"I'd rather keep the peace"

Nobody wants to live or work in a state of conflict. If you grew up in a house where there was shouting, you may have promised yourself that your own home would be calm. Letting things go, biting your tongue and not making a fuss can feel like the way you keep that promise.

So it's worth looking closely at the peace that silence buys. I'd call it quiet, and I think quiet and peace are different things.

Peace, in a household or a team, means that people are at ease with each other. Problems come up and get dealt with, nobody's keeping score, and you can say what you think without bracing for it.

Quiet means only that nothing's being said. Under the quiet there can be a good deal going on. You're keeping a private tally of Saturdays. You're slightly cooler than you used to be. You've withdrawn a little, in ways you may not have noticed, by starting fewer conversations and sharing less and going to bed at different times. The other person senses the withdrawal and responds to it, perhaps by withdrawing too, perhaps by getting irritable. Nothing is said about that either. A home like that is quiet, and I wouldn't call it peaceful.

Researchers who study couples have a name for one common shape this takes. They call it demand and withdraw. One partner presses for change by criticising or nagging, and the other pulls back, goes silent or leaves the room. Paul Schrodt, Paul Witt and Jenna Shimkowski pooled 74 studies of this pattern, with more than fourteen thousand participants. It was reliably associated with worse outcomes. The association was strongest for the quality of the relationship and the quality of communication, and it was present, though weaker, for people's own wellbeing. It held whichever partner did the demanding and whichever did the withdrawing.

These are correlations, and unhappy couples may fall into the pattern as much as the pattern makes them unhappy. But notice that silence is half of it. Going quiet to keep the peace doesn't take you out of the conflict. It gives you one of the two roles in it. Often the same person plays both over time. They withdraw for months and then demand all at once in a car park.

I promised to return to McNulty and Russell's finding about direct communication. In their newlywed studies, openly negative behaviour, such as blaming or making demands, was bad for couples whose problems were minor. It made things worse than they needed to be. But for couples facing serious problems, the same direct behaviour went with more stable satisfaction over the years. The reason seemed to be that the problems themselves got better. The directness was unpleasant in the moment, and it got the problem solved, which the indirect kind never did.

I'm not recommending blame, and you can be direct without it, as chapter 12 will show. What I'd take from the finding is narrower. A relationship can stand a good deal of honest discomfort if it leads to problems being solved. A relationship stands unsolved problems much less well, however pleasant the surface. Couples who never argue aren't necessarily doing well. Sometimes one of them has stopped saying things.

The same holds in a team, or a friendship, or a shared flat. You can share a flat in perfect quiet with someone you've come to dislike over their washing-up. The quiet lasts until one of you moves out, and then you tell other people that it just didn't work.

If peace is what you want, and it's a good thing to want, then the conversation is a better way to get it than silence is. It'll cost you half an hour of discomfort. The quiet was costing you some closeness every week it went on.