Its impact doesn’t negate its intent and vice versa
One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that “silence is an answer.”
This is not the truth.
Silence is not an answer. Silence is the absence of information — nothing more or less. Silence does not indicate a person’s motives, intent, state of being, feelings, or thoughts. Filling in the blanks in the absence of those things is a disservice both to the recipient and giver of the silence.
When we say “silence is an answer,” in the context of relationships, we’re enabling a powerful mental filter of insecurity: mind-reading. It’s especially intoxicating if we know the person well; surely, their silence must mean something they wish for us to understand.
That’s not the case — hardly ever — and learning to accept that means we understand that some silences may never be filled and we don’t know why. In the event that they are, we will often discover more than we expected or assumed.
I’m going to share two stories with my relationship to silence in relationships and what I am learning from both.
Receiving silence
In the first, I recently asked someone to share something with me. It was a big ask. My request was for an entire truth, the largest one I’d ever…
