"If I go quiet, it'll blow over"

If you're the other one, this is your belief, and it's the mirror of chapter 8. You've learned that answering back makes it longer. You've learned that after a while it stops. So when the row starts you get quieter, and you agree with things you don't agree with, and you go and do the dishwasher, and later you'll be told that you went quiet, and you'll wonder what you were supposed to do instead.

Going quiet isn't leaving the row. It's your move in it. Christensen and Heavey's withdrawing partner was still in the conversation, in the sense that mattered, because the withdrawal was the thing the other partner was reacting to. Johnson and Roloff's list of what went with an unresolvable row included pulling away from your partner after an instance, and I'd say going quiet during one is the same thing brought forward. From the pusher's side, quiet reads as "I don't care", or "I'm waiting for you to finish", and it produces more push, which produces more quiet.

The belief that it'll blow over is half right. The instance blows over. The row doesn't, because nothing about it has been touched, and the between fills up with the pusher's sense of not having been heard and your sense of having been got at. The next instance arrives sooner and bigger. Quiet isn't peace. It's a postponement that accrues interest.

There's a version of quiet that's fine, and I'd distinguish it. Saying "I can't do this properly right now, can we do it at eight tomorrow" is quiet with a time on it, and the earlier book Go to bed cross if you have to is built on it. What that gives the pusher is the one thing quiet on its own never does, which is a sign that you're still in. The quiet this chapter is about has no time on it and no sign, and from the outside it looks like a door closing.

If you're the quiet one, the method in chapter 22 gives you a sentence to say instead of nothing, and it's short, and it's not agreement. If you're the pusher reading this to understand the quiet one, the thing to take is that their silence isn't the absence of a position. It's a position they've stopped expecting you to hear.