Walking away mid-argument isn’t quitting. It’s refusing to say something you’ll have to clean up later.

Leaving a fight in the middle looks like losing, which is why people stay in past the point where anything useful is happening. What is happening by then is escalation, both of you reaching for whichever line lands hardest. The words you find in that state are the ones that get remembered for years afterward.

Say what you are doing so it does not read as storming off. I need twenty minutes, I am not finished talking, is enough. Then actually come back, because the pause only works if the conversation happens after it. What you would have said in minute ten is rarely what you think by minute forty.