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THE SILENT KILLER OF RELATIONSHIPS

I have a temper. It’s something I work on, but it’s not something I try to hide. I talk openly about having one and how I try to control it or, at the very least, express it appropriately. I used to know rage well — and not just the road variety either. My anger comes out less these days, but not because I don’t feel it. Every day, there’s a fresh news story reminding me that people, women in particular, have plenty of reasons for rage.

But what I’ve found interesting over the years is that my anger when unleashed might be a fearsome thing, but it’s not as dangerous as my quiet. I was in so many relationships where worry was directed at my anger, not my silence. Arguments were seen as potential problems, but my silence was ignored.

I never deployed silence as a tactic. It wasn’t a cold shoulder in response to offending behavior. Silence, for me, was the place where I went when all my emotions collided into something so much larger and scarier than anger. It wasn’t so much that I was refusing to speak. Words just seemed inferior when it came to communicating something so impossible. I had too many words and not enough, all at the same time.

My closest friends know that my quiet is the most dangerous place for me. I’m not talking out my problems. I’m not raging or crying. I’m just quiet. The silence stretches out, and all the warning signs of a problem are evident. If I can’t communicate about the problem, I’m breaking inside.

That kind of quiet breaks down relationships. My ex didn’t have to worry about me leaving when we were in the middle of a heated exchange. He should have worried when I fell silent and stopped talking about it. When I got to that point, I was so far beyond finding a way to fix what was broken because I had already assessed the damage and decided it was irreparable. I left amid the silence, not the fighting.

But silence is insidious elsewhere, too. It steps in between our friendships, trips us up with colleagues, and even damages our family relationships. Relationships require that we invest ourselves, and if we can’t- or won’t- communicate, we can’t invest in the relationship.

The angry arguments don’t usually kill our relationships; the silences that stretch around them are the real killers. That kind of quiet is dangerous.

Silence as a game, as in the silent treatment, is passive aggressive and damaging to relationships. But silence as a coping mechanism is equally fatal for relationships, even when it’s motivated by self-preservation rather than manipulation. We don’t have to keep allowing quiet to be the silent killer of relationships. There’s a simple solution — even if it’s not always easy to do. Speaking up when we’re in the kind of pain that shuts us down is never easy, but if we value the relationships at risk, we have to move past the pain and do it. To offer up an apology. To admit to insecurities. To say that we feel hurt or lonely or ignored.

We need to communicate, especially in those moments when it’s the last thing we want to do.

Isolating ourselves and shutting down won’t fix the problem. Trust me when I say I have ample experience with this concept. The only thing that has any hope of helping is to speak up and talk with the people in our lives about how we feel. I can’t guarantee they’ll listen, but anything has to be better than suffering in silence and hoping the problems will resolve themselves or disappear altogether. That’s not how problems work. And pain doesn’t disappear because we refuse to speak it into existence. That’s not how pain works either.

Quiet is killing our relationships. It’s not the comfortable silence stretching between two people comfortable in each other’s presence. It’s the silence of too much left unsaid. While we’re busy trying to deal with our emotions, the silence is severing our connections. Our relationships are bleeding out. In all our silence, we can’t get help for ourselves or for our relationships.