Silence is violence. You know how people talk about how silence is the most deafening thing ever? It’s very true, because silence is louder than noise, there is emotion in silence, pain and hurt. In the context of adult relationships, giving someone the silent treatment is the most violent thing you can do. It creates doubt, it creates anxiety, it creates fear and it breaks hearts.

When I was a child, the thing I dreaded most when I had been naughty was not yelling or a spanking, it was getting the silent treatment. When my mum would not speak to me I was crushed, I would rather she yelled, gave me a thousand lashings than that. It broke me, I felt unloved and unwanted. I would do everything I could to earn her forgiveness, earn back her love, the silence was violently displacing.

In living through the pandemic, wow we are still here, I have been thinking about how we show up in our relationships – romantic and platonic. I know, I know when did I turn into this relationship/friendship guru? (You’ll don’t respect me). The thing about this pandemic is that we are constantly being tested, our resilience, our relationships and our sense of self. Friendships, adult friendships play out through many difference lenses, and now in this pandemic these lenses have become very vivid and almost corrosive. I have been very lucky to have some incredible friends that I have taken with me from city to city and many countries too. These are people who I can just really confide in and just build life with, because we often forget that we don’t just build life with partners but friends too.

What I’m starting to notice is thanks to the pandemic, is that the thing that keeps adult relationships going is conversation and transparency. For most people this is very obvious, it wasn’t always to me. I don’t think it’s really that obvious to many people. When you give your friends the silent treatment, it is the most violent thing you can do. It is dangerous and it breaks things and it is a signal that you actually don’t care.

While talking to my therapist recently about the evolving nature of relationships and different stages of friendships. She gave me an analogy couples who are on the brink of divorce. According to her, most couples before they get divorced, will often try a trial separation and see how it goes. And according to her without fail, the couples that ends up not getting divorced after the trial separation are the ones that keeps talking.

Because adult relationships should not have space or silence. They don’t need space because space without conversation is ending. Before you get to needing space you have to understand the root cause of what is breaking your relationship. So if you don’t talk about how actions make you feel and look forward, instead of looking backwards taking space is staying in the problem not moving forward from the problem. It’s a bit of mindfuck when think about it, because I have always thought about space as taking a breath and starting again. However when I examine relationships that I have taken space from, I have seen that they ended up breaking and couldn’t be fixed and I never felt I was getting clarity by having the space. If anything the space broke my heart and made me pull away from the people emotionally.

This makes me think about this notion that as silence is violence. It is how we kill things. We kill things with silence. We kill love with silence. As many social media gurus and tv characters keep reminding us, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Silence leads to indifference and indifference always leads to an ending.

I don’t want to be in relationships that require space, that have too much silence. If the silence we have is one of those where we just haven’t spoken for a while because we are and then we catch up and everything is fine, great. When the silence in communication is because something is wrong then there is a problem. When you actively take space and actively create silence it destroys a relationship.

I’m really excited about learning loads stuff in therapy about handling emotions and dealing with relationship. I have all these new techniques and it’s really making me think of how can I be a better friend to my friends. How do I show up better for them.

How do I make sure I’m telling them how things are making me feel and they feel comfortable enough to tell me how things are making them feel. Even if I don’t like it, it’s important to hear it. I have to keep reminding myself, silence is violence, adult relationships don’t need space, it needs conversation.