what are the consequences of silence?
They warned me, over and over again—marriage is hard. They, people who’d committed for lengths of time with one another I couldn’t yet comprehend, warned that the years together would wear on us and that the work required to stay together would one day feel futile. I always laughed these warnings off. After all, we were different.
I thought they meant it was hard to keep the love alive, but it turns out that loving someone is the easiest thing in the world to do. We long to do it. It comes as naturally as breathing, and once that love settles in, it stays. What’s hard is the inevitable realization that you don’t actually know how to love someone, and worse, you don’t even know how to let them love you.
They don’t tell you that the ones you love will bring out the worst in you and that you will get the worst of them. They don’t tell you you’ll start loving the version of them that lives in your head more than the reality of the one in front of you. They don’t tell you that you will take the things they say and do as unquestioning confirmation or denial of their love.
They don’t tell you that you will keep score, and then even the score when you don’t feel loved enough. That the love will be there, but it will get buried under expectations you didn’t know you had. That once it’s buried, it won’t matter that the love is there, because what good is love when you can’t find it?
They simply say marriage is hard and the longer you are married, the harder it gets, but you can’t hear that when your love is young. When your love is young, all you want is more time, and the more time you have, the more time you want, but time isn’t just something to give or spend. Time is also a container, and the more time you have between you, the more that time holds.
Time holds all the good memories, but it is especially good at preserving the bad ones. It holds every frustration and fight. It carries all your unmet expectations and unrealized hopes. Time will grow heavy with your fears and failures. You begin to carry these buckets of time full of your unresolved hurts into every interaction, trying to unburden yourself but only filling the time with more pain.
When the weight becomes too much to bear, you begin to build a world from it. You begin with putting up walls between you, then the rooms you retreat to alone, and soon you each have a staircase to look down on each other. You put in a window to look away, and eventually, a door appears, beckoning you to leave.
We built so many walls that I couldn’t see what I couldn’t see. We hid the debris of our life together in dark closets and cabinets that threatened to burst at the hinges. We would tread lightly around one another, afraid to disturb the delicate balance. The quiet was meant to keep the peace, but it only built pressure, and pressure always seeks release.
If you wait long enough and if you’re not careful enough, time can become a kind of distance too, and that distance grows when time fills up with silence.
Our silence was like living in a house with a cracked foundation. On the surface, everything seemed solid and safe, but beneath us, the structure slowly weakened with each unspoken word. There was glaring evidence, but we ignored it. I didn’t pay attention to the doors that didn’t close right. I ignored the floors that shifted under my careful steps. I didn’t want to feel how the walls pressed in, making it hard to breathe.
The sounds of all that was unsaid grew louder and louder until a deafening hum of unheard and unresolved hurts filled my head. Under the weight of that silent hurt, our connection withered away, and we withered with it.
In the end, the emotional expanse was too wide to shout over. Instead, we stood on our opposite cliffs, throwing into the gap our old and open wounds, red-hot resentments, and assumptions so old they felt like natural truth.
We thought we knew each other. We thought we understood. But without words, how could there be any knowing? We kept it all in, thinking we were being kind. Why worry you? Why ruin a pleasant night? Why start a fight? Why risk your judgment? Why risk my heart? We buried it all because we were afraid. We buried it so we could pretend it was fine. We buried it because what else could we do with it all?
Fear kept us from speaking, and we passed our long silences with all the wrong words. Tell me about your day, but not about the loneliness inside you. I’ll tell you a joke I read online, but not about my growing fear that you don’t love me. Tell me about your weekend plans, but not about the grief of all you haven’t accomplished. I’ll tell you I haven’t been getting enough sleep, but not that I sometimes dream of running away.
When the pressure of it all grew too great, we exploded, flinging the wreckage and waste like weapons at each other. When the dust settled and we found ourselves again, we took all that was damaged and shoved it back into our dark corners and locked rooms. We called that hiding a kind of healing, but fear grew with every harsh word, every perceived criticism, and every moment of hesitation.
This is the consequence of silence: a world that falls apart so slowly you forget to fix it, a destruction that happens in plain sight and in secret. A death that you feel while you are still alive.
The blame isn’t on one or the other. It never is. Where one failed to ask, the other failed to tell. It’s a failure that we share.
If I could do it all over again, I would say it all to you, all the time. I would never let silence grow between us again. It is one of the great cruelties we commit in love. You can’t truly love someone if all you have of them is what you imagine, and when you hold yourself in, you leave spaces in the others understanding they fill with all their worst fears.
If I could speak up now, I would say that this silence doesn’t have to be our ending. If there is anything left to salvage from these ruins, it is this: we still have time. We can still say it all. And this time, we can listen.
“we couldn’t forgive each other for the things we never said”
Lisa Marie Blair 