Your mother and your wife disagree, and you reach for your phone

It is Sunday afternoon. Your mother says the Diwali cleaning should start this week. Your wife says it should wait until after the weekend, because she has a deadline on Monday. Neither of them is being unreasonable. Then both of them look at you.

You pick up your phone. You open something, anything. You tell yourself you are keeping the peace.

This note is about what that quiet says to each of them, and about one small thing to try tonight.

What the quiet says

From where you sit, the phone is a way of staying out of a fight that is not yours to win. You love both of them. If you speak, you think, one of them will hear that you chose the other.

But each of them is looking at you for a different reason. Your mother is asking whether her view still counts in the house. Your wife is asking whether she has anyone beside her in a house that is also her mother-in-law's. When you look down, neither question gets an answer.

So the quiet that feels neutral to you can feel, to each of them, like being left alone in the room with the other one. Nobody in this scene is wrong. Your mother has run this house for years and wants the festival done properly. Your wife is carrying a deadline and a new place in a family that is still getting to know her. Both of those are fair, and both of them are waiting for the same person to say something.

What students remembered about the silent treatment

Psychologist Kipling Williams and his colleagues have studied ostracism, being ignored or shut out, for many years. In some of their studies, undergraduates were asked to recall a time they had gone silent on someone, and a time someone had gone silent on them. In those accounts, the students who had gone quiet often described it as something that worked: it avoided a fight or ended an argument. The students on the receiving end described something different, a feeling of being pushed out, and resentment afterwards.

This was research on students describing past moments, not on married couples, and certainly not on a husband standing between his mother and his wife. It cannot tell us whether your silence changes anything in your home. What it gives you is a useful question: if the person who goes quiet and the person who receives it can remember the same moment so differently, what might your own quiet look like from the other side of the room?

One thing to try tonight

Do not announce a verdict about the cleaning. You are not required to settle the date. What you can do is speak to each person, separately, in one sentence that takes no side and does not leave her alone.

To your mother, at a quiet moment, perhaps while you bring her tea: "Main kisi ki side nahi le raha. Par aapko akela bhi nahi chhod raha."

To your wife, later, when the two of you are in your room: the same sentence, with her name in it. "Main kisi ki side nahi le raha. Par tumhe akela bhi nahi chhod raha."

Then stop talking and listen to what she says back. You do not have to fix it or defend your mother or defend her. Say the sentence once, and let ten seconds of quiet sit after it.

What the first try will feel like

Your throat may go dry. The sentence can sound too small for the size of the moment, and one of them may say so. You may feel you are saying it in the wrong order, or to the wrong person first. That is the discomfort, and it is part of the exercise rather than a sign it is failing.

Nobody can tell you how the two women in your house will respond, and this note does not claim to. The aim is only that, the next time both of them look at you, there is something to say other than the screen.

This is relationship education, not therapy or medical advice. If any part of this describes what is happening in your relationship, a qualified professional or a local support service is the right next step, and not an article.

Each Sunday: one question to ask your partner, the research behind it, and one thing to try. The free Relationship Checkup is open to everyone, any time. Take the Relationship Checkup