Strange silence that speaks more than Words ever could

Unspoken Words and Emotional Distance

Today, let’s talk about that strange silence that says more than words ever could.

You know which silence I’m referring to, right?

I’m not talking about the kind of silence where you’re all sitting in a café—whether it’s two of you or a whole group—your freshly ordered fries or pizza has arrived, the dishes are placed in front of everyone… but everyone’s just eating fry by fry, bite by bite, while being completely absorbed in scrolling Instagram. Sure, there’s silence everywhere, but I wouldn’t call it deathly quiet—it’s just that everyone’s chosen to be silent, creating a peaceful atmosphere.

But that’s not the silence I’m writing about here.

What I’m discussing, touches all of us, applies to all of us equally, and is just as real for everyone—but specifically, it’s about two people… perhaps lovers, people whose relationship has intimacy, yet there’s this silence between them. I’m talking about that silence where the situation is the same—both sitting in a café—but neither is busy scrolling Instagram, yet there’s this weird kind of silence. As if neither feels the presence of the other. Like there’s an invisible wall between them. That invisible wall that neither of them is consciously aware of. Why? Is someone upset? If so, why? What happened? Unknown to this… a wall built from countless such questions.

Emotional Distance

This gap is created only when both parties start lacking ‘honesty’ with each other. There might not be hatred, but somewhere the intimacy has taken a hit, developed a crack, and both sides start avoiding honest conversation.

When you ask “How are you?” and get a bland, emotionless response like “I’m fine”—without any warmth or feeling—that’s when you know something’s off.

When you realize something has broken somewhere, questions arise: When did this confusion begin? Maybe both forgot to say ‘thank you’ for each other’s efforts. Maybe both said something to each other that the other didn’t like, and neither apologized for it.

Maybe both held such expectations from each other: “They should have understood on their own, shouldn’t they?”

Unexpressed Feelings – Unvoiced Emotions

These unexpressed feelings, these unvoiced emotions, are like those emails you never open and mostly never delete—or those emails that are actually important but accidentally ended up in spam, so you never notice them. They just lie there as junk in your inbox or junk folder.

Such feelings keep accumulating until one day your inbox gets full. No new emails can come in, nor can you send any—you can’t add new feelings because there’s no storage left in your emotional inbox! Any messages or feelings remain unread and misunderstood, unknowingly.

And then begins the discussion—arguments—pointing out each other’s mistakes… complaints about not being honest with each other:

“Why didn’t you reply to my message?”

“If something I said hurt you, you should have told me!”

“You always see only my mistakes—why don’t you think about your own for once!”

“Don’t go in circles now!”

In such situations, whose fault is it? Maybe both parties’, and realistically speaking, maybe no one’s.

The conversation becomes complicated, but it’s the truth because all of us have been raised with so-called good values. Be nice to everyone, keep smiling, and don’t behave in ways that hurt others.

We become so tangled and twisted in conflicts with our own ‘self’ that we want to convey something, but words come out of our mouths that end up conveying what we didn’t mean to say. Maybe what shouldn’t be said gets said, and what should be said remains unsaid. Often, the other person says something, and we understand something completely different.

State of confusion,

In this state of confusion, our mental state becomes so negative that no matter how positively the other person speaks, our mind interprets it negatively. We give it a negative meaning.

In these circumstances, a situation arises where you can neither speak nor bear it. And mostly, it results in silence. In movies, such situations are added to create dramatic moments, but in real life, such silence comes with a very heavy price.

More Closeness- Creates more Distance

Here, the more closeness there is between two people, the more distance it creates.

This happens because it’s not a case of “quick action, quick reaction” or “one blow, two cuts”—instead, it rusts slowly, these feelings gradually start melting away, without any explanation. All those small, trivial matters, misunderstandings that have no real substance but never came out because they were never addressed.

Finally, the silence must be broken… and to break that silence, we need ‘forgive me,’ ‘sorry,’ ‘thank you,’ or ‘I can understand what you must have gone through.’ But saying these requires courage, and we need to break our inner ego.

“You are important to me.”

Just as silence can be important in its place, the complications hidden behind it are equally important because they’re what create the breakdown. The answer to these complications isn’t found by searching for “whose fault is it?” but by being ready to accept “you are important to me.”

What’s necessary is that the silence breaks…

In other words, before the silence shatters completely, an attempt should be made to understand and listen to each other’s silence.

Come on, let’s delete something from that emotional inbox today. Let’s clear out the junk from the full storage to reduce the space occupied by emotions and increase space for adding new feelings.

Sometimes the most profound conversations happen in the spaces between words, and the most important healing begins when we finally decide to clean out our emotional inbox.