You remember the fight, not the hundred fine days around it. Memory has a favorite genre.

One bad night can outweigh a hundred ordinary good ones in memory. Conflict is vivid and frightening, and fear writes hard, while the fine days leave almost no trace because nothing demanded recording. So your sense of a friendship or a family slowly drifts toward its worst scenes and feels accurate while it does.

When you are weighing up a relationship, deliberately count the ordinary weeks next to the bad night. Ask yourself whether the pattern or the episode is the truer story. Both happened, but only one of them volunteers itself.