Episode 21: Death By Silence

In this episode, we challenge the belief that arguing and conflict within a relationship is “bad”.
We talk about something far more insidious that can spell doom for a long-term relationship. And that is non-communication or silence.
The irony is that you might think silence is helpful to maintain harmony (and maybe it is in the short term), but the more you do this, the more you build up problems down the road.
We talk about:

•  An extremely silent 10-year anniversary dinner
•  How non-communication killed Richard’s first marriage
•  Talking about the kids/work/logistics is NOT talking
•  The destructiveness of stonewalling
•  Why the goal is to argue better (not stop arguing at all)

We want to hear your thoughts and questions, so if there's anything you would like us to cover on the show, please drop us a line on

 info@thebone-zone.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Bone Zone. I'm Sarah.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

And I'm Richard.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

And in this podcast, we excavate sex and relationship myths and uncover the truth of how it all really works. We bridge the esoteric and practical worlds to bring you grounded, sage, and tangible advice and tools, whether you're looking to attract a soulmate relationship or grow and expand within an existing one.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, and good night. Your salutations have gotten better, dear Sarah.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Well, I just said hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Yeah, but you normally choose a certain silly tone to say hello in every episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

No.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Okay, great. That was so inspiring. Now death by silence. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

And no, we're not talking about a vipus and a retreat for those of you that have gone to a retreat and not talked for 10 days.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Yeah. Um, so I think you have well, Sarah's gonna tell the story of what we saw on holiday, which was like kind of blew my mind a little bit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

So and then I'm gonna tell my own story. The holiday was like a whole vibe um with lots of drama and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

But our drama. What you mean we didn't get back home?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

We yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Because of all the tensions.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but no, there was our own drama as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

We we will do a separate episode on a Oh that evening, the evening when I said I was gonna throw you over the edge into the sea.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

That would be another episode. This episode though I did say that by the way.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

But anyway.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

We were out for dinner one evening. It was a lovely evening.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

It was beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

And uh one of the tables in the restaurant was decorated with flowers and it said happy 10-year anniversary on it. So we were like, Oh wow, look, these this couple who hadn't arrived yet, um, how exciting it's their 10-year anniversary. And then this other couple came. Do you remember there was that other couple?

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Indian couple, she was like looking all lovely in the sari.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

She was wearing a beautiful sari, and they were taking photos of each other, and I was like, oh my god, that must be the couple having their 10-year anniversary.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Yeah, until I realised, well, did they get married when they were like nine years old?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

No, no, no, no. I think they were in their 30s. Like they looked very young, anyway. No, they were in their 30s, darling, clearly. Anyway, clearly, so um, they were not the couple.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

You're doing that thing with the pea again.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

They were not the couple, the couple arrived maybe half an hour after we sat down, and yeah, the whole dinner, it was extraordinary. So the woman was beautifully and elegantly dressed, her hair was made up, and the man was dressed in a t-shirt. A t-shirt, shorts, shorts, flip-flops, flip-flops.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

He sits at the table and he kind of sags down in that kind of posture that people have sometimes when they're watching TV.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

The only thing that was missing is like him scratching his balls actually at the table.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Well, actually, he might have done that. I mean, we weren't watching them the entire time because that would have been creepy.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Creepy.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Um, so the entire meal, I don't think they talked at all. He was on his phone for I'd say about 75 to 80% of the time.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

And she wasn't initially. She was just waiting for him to sort of, I don't know, happy anniversary, I love you.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

She wasn't initially, and then it seems like she gave it up, and then they were both on their phones. And okay, I mean, this was more than just dress sense. This was an entire vibe of I don't give a fuck. I don't give a fuck. Whether that was actually true or not, who knows. But there is something going on if you are supposedly celebrating something in a big way that you've told a restaurant and they've decorated your table and brought you special wine and food and whatever, and you basically look to all intents and purposes like you couldn't give a fuck.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

My god.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

So this led to the question how do people get there? Right, where they go out and they literally have nothing to say to each other anymore.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Or they just don't care. Or actually they don't know how to communicate anymore. Um my story d with my ex-wife, it wasn't a similar thing to that. I would never, you know, go out.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

You actually probably wouldn't even have bothered to take her out for your anniversary anyway.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Um I'm just actually trying to think, did I ever romance her? I didn't oh listen, I was a different guy then. I was like, I thought romanti um being romantic was you know, give me a sick bag so I can quietly throw up in a corner. I was that guy that didn't know how to, had no idea. And I was the guy who learnt at a very early young age in boarding school in the UK that to shut the fuck up meant people left you alone and you maintained a fake harmony. Okay. And I learnt this when I was six or seven years old. The teachers were quite cruel with the students, there was a lot of hitting and giving the cane out. We even had a couple of pedos at that school for teachers, actually. Anyway, that's a different story. And um you learnt to disassociate with everything. And obviously I carried all of this shit through with me into my all the way into my last marriage. And um you know, everyone thought we were the wonder couple. Oh, you guys never argue, it's so amazing, and and and I thought I convinced myself, yeah, it's pretty good. We never argue argue, we are the model couple. And as the years went on, I still didn't realise what it was that was happening. And it was in the last year because let's not forget I was working with her as well. We had a business together, which we continued after our separation and divorce, and I realized that there was just no communication. If we weren't talking about work, we weren't talking really about anything at all. We'd never had an argument in the I met her in 1996.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

And the twenty years sorry, you never had an argument in twenty years. Never had an argument that is frigging insane. I can't imagine having a close relationship with anyone where I didn't have an argument.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Never, never at all. Any any anger that she might have had, and for sure she did, and then any anger towards her that I might have had, or any triggering situations, we've kept it to ourselves. Sure enough, that silence came to bite us on the arse.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Well, this is death by silence.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

This is death by silence, and you know, listen, she's still part of my life, she's like family to me, and um um. But the fact is, and we talk a lot more now, obviously, because she's gone off and done her own uh growth work uh by herself with her boyfriend, and they've grown together as a couple, and now she's opened up and she started talking, which is great. And I have done the same because Sarah was a great facilitator in that because Sarah was the opposite.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

Sarah was like confrontation queen, yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Well, you know, you attract the people that sometimes you need in your life to teach you the lessons that you need to learn, but you gotta be fucking listening, you gotta learn. And uh I realize all of that now, and I think we covered some of this, you know, sort of past relationships thing in in a previous podcast. But anyway, the fact is that staying there and not voicing a concern, constantly making concessory statements inside your head, oh well, it doesn't matter, it's fine, or we'll get to it next time. You're always conceding, conceding, conceding. It literally can be so damaging to you, and it can be damaging eventually to your health, because after a while the body starts to sort of say, Hey, asshole, wake the fuck up. Um minded as well, in a variety of different ways. So the the the core of this story is silence kills always kills a relationship, and if anyone says, Oh, we've never had an argument before, they're gonna be in quite big trouble going forward.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I mean, I wanna actually give um uh another example of death by silence, but also examples of arguing couples as well. Um so one of my friends is going through a particularly messy divorce at the moment, and uh yeah, I mean I mean particularly messy. I'm not gonna go into I'm not gonna go into much further detail than that, but essentially I'd seen the writing on the wall for many years because they had literally stopped talking, and I mean literally they would text or email rather than rather than sit and have a conversation living in the same house, and if they were talking to each other, it was about their kids and nothing else. So it was logistics to do with what the kids were doing, etc. And over time that literally led to the death of the relationship. Yes, of course, there were other factors as well, it's never as simple as that, but that was a major contribution. And you know, they were doing therapy at one point, but I remember having a conversation with her about the therapy, and I said, Have you tried talking to each other outside of therapy? And she was like, No, like, but the the tone with which she said it was it was a surprise that one might have to do that. Um and another thing that I think is worth mentioning here that can lead to that death by silence. Obviously, we're speculating on what was going on with this couple that were having a couple of times.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

We can never truly know what goes on between two people in a couple.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yes. So especially if we're observing people at dinner, we don't know. Maybe they had a massive fight before the before the dinner, who knows? But a common thing that tends to happen in relationships is something called stonewalling. It's particularly prevalent amongst men. So when men feel emotionally flooded, which means that they are overcome with emotions that they don't know how to deal with. So, for example, if their partner's shouting at them, picking at them, etc. If they become flooded, they stonewall, which basically means they completely shut down.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

They don't fight back and guilty. Yeah, right. So silence reigns again. That is an extremely destructive behavior because nothing gets solved. You don't deal with your emotions, you don't learn how to regulate yourself properly, you never really resolve the things that you're being picked at for the core of the problem itself.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

Usually the sources are kind of a big one, and that these all these problems come flying at you because of one particular thing that's going on that is unresolved.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Yes. Um for the person that's uh maybe is in more of that attacking role, that feeling of being ignored or stonewalled kind of perpetuates the problem.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

So it did with us. Yes, that's it really did with us.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

That feeling of being ignored.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

I recall once her best friend, it was early on in our relationship, they had a flat, an apartment together. And whenever I was over there, fucking hell. I would I would be doing something in a different room, and suddenly I hear the shrieks and getting louder and louder and louder, and then it would explode, and I'd be sitting there going, Fuck me, what is going on? I don't want any part of this. And then I walk back in the room and they'd be sitting there normally talking as if nothing at all had happened. Sometimes it's just healthy to get it off your chest, and you can do that in a variety of different ways. You can have a shrieking match, a shouting match, and then it calms down, and then things get talked about. You can sit down and talk about it without getting triggered or angry, and you know, there are other ways as well, but one way not to do it is to sit there in fucking silence. Yes. Or stonewall.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

And I am so guilty of that, and I'm I do not do that anymore when I mentioned earlier on in the episode that uh we did have a moment on the holida in in the holiday that I looked at her and I said, You don't really know what I want to do to you now. She went no. I said, I wanted to pick you up and throw you over the edge into the beautiful liquid crystal transparent water with all the lovely little stingrays and fish.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

There weren't any string rays anyway.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Do you really have to be pedantic right now? Yes. Okay. Okay. And anyway, and so but I said it very calmly and we smiled about it because obviously that's something we're gonna go into this in another episode. It's something that I would never do. But my point being, excuse me, let me finish, is that we just ended up talking about it. We did not stay silent, it was resolved, and we can hardly even remember what it was about. But anyway, we'll try and remember and do an episode around that particular uh situation.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

I remember, I remember more.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Do you really?

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Um not really. No, you don't need so I mean going back to fighting, fighting is healthy. So trying to get rid of arguments and disagreements completely and being like, oh, I have to learn about conflict resolution, it's much better to look at actually maybe arguing has its benefits and good points. Let's look at the way that we argue and learn how to do that better so that we're not carrying forward all these emotional triggers. So obviously, if you're both screaming and shouting at each other, you're not going to resolve anything. So it makes sense for someone to be like, right, let's take time out and come back to this. But at least through that screaming and shouting, yes, you are getting things off your chest. And yes, with my best friend from school, we used to scream and shout at each other, and we'd just get over it. No one really understood this dynamic, and it was the I mean, it was the same with my auntie and uncle. So everyone in the family were like, Oh, they love each other so much, but they used to have vicious arguments.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

She was the one being vicious to him, actually. But um, yeah, so and he would just say, Leave me alone, piss off. And he would like walk away, actually. So he did actually, maybe he was a bit of a stonewaller as well.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

He actually would let her get it out because he knew that's how she calms down. That was her way.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

You didn't have a choice.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

She she blows up, she calms down, and actually, that is something that's pretty prevalent in our family. It's something I used to do as well. Blow up, and then I calm down, but the person I've just blown up at may not be so calm. Um, I've done a lot of work around around that, like why I feel the urge to blow up.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yes, yes, you have.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Um but the point is that it's best to blow up than not.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

If you're gonna do it in a particular way, blow up, calm down, and then talk about it, but never stay silent and accumulate all these uh emotions that never get released. Yes, you know, exactly a bit of silence then, death by silence.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

No, I I think we can end there because that's pretty much all I wanted to say on the topic. But to summarize, if you are sweeping things under the carpet because you think it's going to keep the harmony, believe me, it will come and bite you in the arse later down the road. So you can think of it as short-term pain versus long-term pain. Short-term pain is you face the disagreement now, and obviously there's pain involved in doing that, but later you it is likely that you will learn to argue in a better way, and your overall relationship will be better as a result of it, versus avoiding the short-term pain of the argument, and then later down the road things can fall to shit anyway. And I think I don't know whether this is an urban myth, but the story of the man that comes home one day and says to his wife after 30 years of marriage, oh, by the way, darling, I'm leaving you. And the wife is like, Oh my god, this is such a surprise.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Um I think we've talked about this before.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

Yeah, because they've never had an argument. And it turns out when you kind of look in, yes, okay, they weren't arguing, but they just weren't really talking or connecting at all.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

No, they weren't. And and guys.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

And girls.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

No, this is for the men.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Oh right.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

From Excuse me. Yeah, it's not all about you always. Anyway, um, gentlemen, I uh don't stonewall. You know, one thing I've learned to do, and it's taken me a long time to learn because I have to completely reprogram everything. If your woman shouts at you, just turn around, take her in your arms, and ask her, what's this really about? It fucking works. Well, it works for me. Because sometimes, well, a lot of the time, unless you've really messed up in some kind of way, um, that you deserve to be shouted at, and believe me, I know some men who do deserve every single bit of fucking nagging that they receive from their partners because well, for plenty of reasons, but if it's you know you haven't done anything uh in particular to trigger your partner, just hold her, take her, hold her in your arms, and just ask her what's this really about. And with us, I mean for me, it really works, and I think uh a woman would appreciate you doing that. It's a very masculine thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

It creates emotional safety, it creates emotional safety. It gives a massive.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Haven't finished.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

No, no, but this is an important point.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Yeah, but I haven't finished

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Okay, who's gonna back down first?

SPEAKER_00 22:03

I've actually now fucking forgotten what I was gonna say. Thanks very much, wife.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

It gives the message that however the woman feels, whatever her emotions are, it's okay, it's safe for you to express that emotion. And I do apologize for interrupting you. Funny story.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Deal with you later.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

One of my friends that listens to the podcast was like, I love the podcast, but you're always interrupting Richards.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, you always pounce into your masculine because you have all this information inside your head jostling for release. And you know what? I don't mind because um I have been known to just simply confuse people. No, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

I I just like interrupting you.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Great, I'm glad you really enjoy it. Um I'm happy to facilitate that for you. But uh, and also another thing that works is and this was I uh this was you know on the holiday, you know, it's smiling and saying, you know, I really want to throttle you right now. I wouldn't do it, but I really want to, and you know, with us where you just say it really calmly, it's kind of disarming sometimes because um Sarah realized that she was like going a bit nuts.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Um no, okay, we're gonna come back. We're gonna come back to this another time because this argument actually came ten days after another quite vicious argument. We have it was vicious from my side. Um, but anyway, that will be for another episode. We'll talk about, you know, some of what that was about.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

I think that will be a very interesting episode talking about these two events and how they were handled, um, what we learnt from them. Uh it's awesome because you can a solid couple that intends on having a a great relationship together. You gotta go through and eat this particular kind of shit sandwich. You're gonna have arguments, you're gonna fight, you're gonna disagree, you're gonna raise your voice. But there's a kind of a bit there's some tweaking that can be done to make it to be kind of even thankful afterwards that it happened because you both learnt something. That's what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

And that's it.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

That's all for today, folks.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Oh, yeah, we did quite a good job for someone who didn't really fancy doing a podcast this evening.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Yeah, it's just been a long day.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

It's been a long day, but we said we were gonna do one. We kept a commitment to ourselves and to you all, and we will love you and leave you, and uh we hope you enjoyed the um imaginary homosexual pigeons podcast from last Friday. It got quite a few downloads, so I will catch you on the next one. Bye for now. Bye for now. We'd like to thank you for tuning in and listening to this episode today. If you like what you heard, I invite you to follow our show. And if you really liked our show, head over and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. We also want to hear your thoughts and questions. So, if there's anything you would like us to cover on the show, please drop us a line on the email below. Thank you for listening, and until next time.