The relationship advice you can officially stop following.

“Never go to bed angry.”

It’s the relationship advice cliche you’ve no doubt heard a hundred times from your grandma, your aunt, and your girlfriends.

Or, at the very least, from glossy women’s magazines who, since well before sealed sections even existed, have insisted that resolving arguments before bedtime is the ‘apple a day’ needed to keep break-ups away.

But here’s the thing. In my experience, night-time arguments are the worst arguments.

Picture this: you’re exhausted from a long day at work. You’ve polished off two glasses of red over a late dinner. You change into your pjs, brush your teeth, and climb into bed to catch some sleep before that early meeting at work.

And then your partner tells you he’s cancelling upcoming plans to see a friend, or mentions you forgot to do that errand he’s been nagging you about all week.

One of you makes a throwaway, narky remark; the other fires back out of sleep deprivation. And before you know it, you’re having a full-blown argument about next to nothing. (Or maybe it is about something, but, let’s be honest, your brain’s too fried to do logic right now.)

Suddenly, it’s midnight and there’s still no resolution to the errands/clothes/plans issue — and on top of that, your eyes feel like sandpaper and you know you’ll feel frazzled at work the next day.

You could’ve quit at narky comment #1, but you didn’t — because somewhere in your brain is buried the advice that going to bed angry equals BAD. And now you’re sleepy, fed up and the teeniest bit resentful that your plan to sleep blissfully for eight hours has been thwarted.

And it’s not just me saying that, either: it seems experts might actually agree with me.

As psychologist and senior Relationships Australia NSW Kylie Hitchman counsellor told me yesterday, ‘sometimes it does take longer’ than the time before bed to resolve an argument.

Ms Hitchman agrees that you shouldn’t force a resolution if that’s only going to make it worse.

“Ideally, if people can calm themselves down enough to resolve the issue then that’s the main thing,” she says.

But “if you’re having a fight at midnight, it’s not going to be helpful to keep fighting until the wee hours,” she adds.

Aha! I knew it felt like a bad idea.

Hitchman also agrees that growing resentful at a lack of sleep, not being sober, or other factors ‘that are going to cause extra stress’ are unlikely to contribute to an argument’s resolution.

“You’re not going to resolve anything if you can’t get that sleep,” she says.

“For couples to resolve emotional issues they have to be in a calm emotional state… So having a delay to get to that state is really important.”

She adds that, if one or both of you are already hyped-up and raging, you’re even less likely to sort the issue out before beftimne.

“People don’t really listen when they’re in that anger, rage mode,” she adds.

“It does need time for people to calm themselves down,” she says. “Particularly when someone’s gone into that mode of emotional overload or anger.”

And if that calm-down time is going to mean you both staying up until 2am? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Put on your eyemask, have a cup of herbal tea, and stop niggling at eachother — until the alarm goes off in the morning, at least.

Because sometimes, you’ve got to go to bed angry.

Do you go to bed without resolving an argument with your partner?