What couples do not say to each other
Every relationship installs a list of subjects no longer raised. It forms without a decision, and what it contains says more than what gets said.
A list that writes itself
Nobody decides one day to stop talking about money, in-laws or an abandoned plan. A subject is raised, the conversation goes badly, and it is not taken up again. A few repetitions are enough to install it among the things one does not talk about.
The list is rarely known to both in the same way. Each has their own, and sometimes discovers with surprise that the other was avoiding a subject they thought was simply of no interest.
The economy of silence
Avoiding a subject has a real use: it preserves the climate, avoids a spoiled evening, and makes it possible to deal with the rest. A relationship where everything was permanently on the table would be exhausting, and the idea that one should say everything does not survive examination.
The problem is therefore not the existence of the list, it is its growth. Each subject withdrawn from the discussable domain reduces the surface on which it remains possible to explain oneself, and that reduction is cumulative.
What the accumulation produces
Work on marital conflict describes a behaviour associated with deterioration: withdrawal, where one stops answering. It generally appears late, after prolonged exposure to exchanges that lead nowhere.
Avoidance produces a neighbouring effect by another route. What is not said does not disappear, it resurfaces in unrelated conversations, which makes those incomprehensible to whoever lacks the key. An argument about the shopping is almost never an argument about the shopping.
Reopening a closed subject
The difficulty lies in how long it has been closed. Reopening a subject avoided for three years amounts to announcing that you have been thinking about it for three years, which immediately shifts the conversation onto not having said so sooner.
The only known way around this effect is to name it up front, indicating that you are reopening something old and why now. That does not make the conversation easy; it prevents it from bearing on something other than its object.
What it is reasonable to aim at
Not a relationship without avoided subjects, which does not exist, but a list whose content you know. Knowing that you no longer raise a given subject, and why, is very different from having forgotten it.
This knowledge has a practical virtue: it allows you to decide rather than to undergo. Some subjects deserve to stay closed, and the conscious choice to leave them there has nothing in common with automatic avoidance.
Key points
The list of avoided subjects forms without a decision, by the simple repetition of exchanges that go badly.
Avoiding a subject is useful; it is the accumulation that reduces the surface on which it remains possible to explain oneself.
What is not said resurfaces in unrelated conversations, which become incomprehensible to the other.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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