"I'm still here, I'm just quiet"

You're not shouting at anyone. You're not on the laptop. You're at the table, you're on the sofa, you're in the room, and if you're a bit quiet tonight, well, people are allowed to be quiet. Nobody's being harmed by you sitting there thinking.

The families in the research would say otherwise, and the research has been looking at this for a long time. Repetti, in a study of 33 air traffic controllers and their wives across three days, found that on heavy days at work the controllers came home and withdrew. They talked less, engaged less, and were less angry rather than more. Marc Schulz and colleagues followed 42 couples for three days and found that a day that had been more negatively arousing at work was followed by angrier behaviour at home for the women and more withdrawn behaviour for the men. Lisa Story and Rena Repetti followed 43 couples for five days. After days with negative social interactions at work, both partners reported more anger and more withdrawal at home. The withdrawal is what the passenger looks like from the outside. You're quiet because you're at the desk.

The point isn't that quiet is a crime. Repetti's original study made an interesting suggestion, which is that withdrawing after a hard day might be how a wound-up person gets back to normal, and that partners who let it happen may be helping. I think that's right, and I don't want you to read this chapter and decide the answer is to perform cheerfulness at the table with the spreadsheet still running underneath. That's the same leftovers with a smile on.

The difference that matters is between withdrawal that's announced and withdrawal that isn't. If you come in and say you've had a day, that you're going to be poor company for half an hour, and that it's nothing to do with anyone here, then the quiet has a shape and an end and an explanation. The people in the room know what they're looking at. If you come in and just go quiet, they're left to read it, and what they read, as the earlier book It wasn't about you described, is usually themselves. Your partner wonders what they've done. Your daughter tells the shoe story to a nodding face and learns something about whether her stories are worth telling.

So say so. It's one sentence and it changes what the quiet means. And then give the half hour a real end, because a half hour that's announced and never finishes is worse than one that was never announced at all.