Silence Collects Its Own Evidence

Some problems begin with something that was never said. Others begin with something that was said and understood completely differently. I think the second kind can sometimes be worse, especially when two people cannot talk face to face.

Messages are dangerous things. You write something with a smile on your face and the other person reads it with anger. You make a joke; they think you are serious. You answer briefly because you are busy; they think you are losing interest. Nothing in the message changes. Only the person reading it does.

That is the strange thing about written communication. Words arrive without the person who wrote them. There is no voice, expression, hesitation, or small smile saying, “I’m joking.” The reader supplies all of that, and sometimes they supply the wrong version.

One misunderstanding is usually manageable. The real trouble begins when it creates another misunderstanding. Someone reads your message incorrectly and responds angrily. You read the anger without knowing what caused it, so you misunderstand them too. Soon nobody is responding to what the other person actually meant. Two people are arguing with imaginary versions of each other.

Both sides may still feel completely reasonable. From your side, the story makes sense. From theirs, another story makes sense. The problem is that the two stories are no longer the same story.

This is especially dangerous at the beginning of a relationship, when there is not enough history to interpret missing information. After years with someone, you know how they joke, what silence means when they are tired, and which reactions are unusual. With a new person, you have much less evidence, so you build the missing parts yourself.

A new person does not yet exist completely in your mind. You construct them from a message, a look, a sentence, something they wrote somewhere, something another person told you. Inevitably, part of that person is imaginary. Then comes the dangerous part: you begin expecting the real person to behave like the version you created.

A harmless sentence becomes evidence. A late reply becomes evidence. A joke becomes evidence. Soon you are no longer trying to understand a person; you are trying to prove your theory about them.

Trust is difficult at the beginning because neither person has enough shared history yet. We test people, usually without telling them there is a test. Will they call? Will they remember? Will they become jealous? Will they disappear? The other person does not know the rules, and then we are disappointed when they fail.

First impressions therefore become too powerful. A mistake that would be forgotten after ten years together can become decisive after ten days because there is no history to balance it. Only the mistake remains visible.

Time can make this worse. If a misunderstanding is resolved quickly, it may disappear. If it is left alone, it begins collecting meaning. The original sentence becomes less important than the questions around it: Why didn’t you explain? Why didn’t you call? Why did you wait? Why didn’t you care enough to fix it?

Silence creates its own evidence. One person may be silent because they are afraid of making things worse; the other reads the silence as indifference. Both may be waiting for the same thing. Neither moves. Sometimes there is no real disagreement at all, only two people standing on opposite sides of the same silence.

I also think it is a mistake to reconstruct a person entirely from what they write online. People write for different reasons: anger, boredom, humor, memory, exaggeration, curiosity, loneliness. A collection of sentences is not a person.

I was writing on Ekşi Sözlük at the time, and looking back makes this obvious. One entry might be technical, the next ridiculous, another sad, another angry, another about a film. Someone trying to reconstruct my entire personality from a single day’s entries would probably build several different people. Each might contain a piece of me. None would be me.

We make the same mistake offline. We reduce people to moments: the thing they said during an argument, the day they forgot something, the badly answered message, the time they disappointed us. We take one frame and pretend we have seen the whole film.

Perhaps understanding someone requires allowing them to contradict the version of them we have created. That is difficult because being wrong about another person can hurt our pride. Sometimes it is easier to lose the person than admit our interpretation was wrong.

After enough misunderstandings, fixing things really can become difficult, not because the original problem was impossible, but because too much has been built on top of it: new suspicion, new arguments, new sentences, new silence.

Maybe that is why certain conversations need to happen early, face to face if possible, with enough time and without trying to win. Not every disagreement needs a clever answer. Sometimes all that is needed is a simple question: What did you mean?

Years ago I ended the original entry with a sentence: Sometimes words are so inadequate. I would add something today.

Sometimes words are inadequate. But silence can be worse.