Shikha Sharma

I have a friend, Ankita, who once didn't speak to her husband for four days over a disagreement about curtains.

That’s right. Actual curtains. The kind you hang on windows.

Hey, don’t judge her. 

She’s not a mean person or a petty one. She's warm and funny and one of the most self-aware people I know. But somewhere in that curtain disagreement, she hit a wall internally, shut down, and went completely quiet. She answered direct questions with one word. She was present in the house but completely absent from the marriage. And her husband, not knowing what else to do, went quiet too. Four days of two people moving around each other in total silence, neither one willing to be the first to speak, over curtains.

I asked her later what the silence was actually about. She thought about it for a while and said, “Honestly? I didn’t even know. I just couldn’t find the words and then too much time passed and it felt too late to start.”

That’s the thing about the silent treatment that nobody talks about. It rarely starts as a weapon. It usually starts as a retreat. You’re overwhelmed, or hurt, or so frustrated you don’t trust what will come out of your mouth if you open it. So you close it. And then closing it becomes its own problem, bigger than the original one.

I was at Ankita’s place one Sunday afternoon when this conversation happened, both of us having chai and working through a packet of Sunfeast Marie Light that had been sitting on her kitchen counter. Her husband was in the next room. The curtains, for what it’s worth, were the ones she'd wanted. She’d won the argument without saying a word, which she acknowledged was not the win it sounds like.

Why We Go Silent

The technical term for what Ankita did is stonewalling, and relationship researchers take it seriously. Dr. John Gottman, who has spent decades studying couples, identifies stonewalling as one of the four most destructive behaviours in a relationship, alongside criticism, contempt, and defensiveness. He calls them the Four Horsemen, which feels dramatic until you’ve watched a four-day curtain silence up close.

The reason stonewalling is so damaging isn’t just that it shuts down communication. It’s that it sends a message, whether you intend it to or not. The message is, you are not worth engaging with right now. And that message lands hard, even when the person going silent is doing it purely out of self-protection.

My friend Rohan is on the receiving end of this in his relationship. His partner shuts down during conflict, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. He described it to me as feeling like he’d been put in a holding pattern with no landing time. “I don’t even know what I’m waiting for,” he said. “I just know I’ve done something wrong and I’m not allowed to fix it yet.”

That’s the cruelty of the silent treatment, even the unintentional kind. It punishes the other person while giving the silent one a sense of control. And control, if we’re being honest, is usually what it’s really about.

The Self-Protection Trap

Here’s what I’ve noticed in every couple I’ve watched go through this. The person going silent almost always has a good reason, at least from the inside.

They’re scared that if they speak, they’ll say something they can’t take back. They’re so flooded with emotion that words feel dangerous. They’ve tried talking before and it didn’t work, so silence feels safer. They need time to process and don’t know how to ask for it without the whole thing escalating.

All of these are legitimate. The problem is that none of them get communicated. So the other person isn’t getting “I need space to process this.” They’re getting nothing. And nothing, in a conflict, always gets interpreted as the worst possible thing.

My college friend Preethi told me her husband used to go silent for hours after fights and she’d spend the whole time convinced he was thinking about leaving her. He was, by his own later admission, mostly just trying to calm down enough to have a conversation without saying something he’d regret. Same behaviour, completely opposite interpretations. They had this mismatch for three years before they actually talked about it.

What Works Instead

The replacement for the silent treatment isn’t forcing yourself to talk before you’re ready. That produces the thing you were trying to avoid. A conversation that goes badly because at least one person isn’t in a state to have it well.

The replacement is saying out loud what the silence is trying to communicate, before you go silent.

Something like, “I need about twenty minutes before I can talk about this properly.” Or: “I'm too wound up right now and I don't want to say something I don't mean. Can we come back to this after dinner?” These sentences do something the silence can’t. They tell your partner what’s happening, they give a timeframe, and they signal that you’re not abandoning the conversation, just pausing it.

Rohan’s partner started doing this about a year ago, after a particularly bad stretch where the silences had stretched into days and both of them were miserable. Just naming it changed everything. “I need some time” is a completely different message from four days of nothing. One is a request. The other is a punishment, even when it isn’t meant to be.

The Part About Coming Back

The other thing I’ve noticed is that the pause only works if you actually come back. If “I need twenty minutes” turns into two hours of avoidance, and two hours turns into going to bed without talking, you haven’t paused the conversation. You've just done the silent treatment with extra steps.

Ankita and her husband have a rule now, worked out after the great curtain silence, that they’re not allowed to go to bed without at least acknowledging what they’re fighting about, even if they haven't resolved it. Not a full conversation necessarily, just a check-in. “We’re still in it but I’m not going anywhere.” That’s enough to stop the silence from calcifying into something worse overnight.

It sounds like a small thing. Most of the things that keep relationships intact are small things, done consistently, before they become big things.

The silent treatment feels like power in the moment. It isn’t. It’s just distance, dressed up as control. And distance, left long enough, has a way of becoming permanent without anyone deciding that’s what they wanted.

Say the thing. Or say that you need a moment before you can say the thing. Either one works. The silence doesn’t.