Avoiding every hard talk isn’t peace. It’s a pile of laundry you keep shoving in the closet.

Quiet achieved by never raising anything is not the same as things being fine. The unsaid does not decay; it collects, and it leaks out through tone, distance and small avoidances that neither person names. What looks like harmony is often a storage problem.

Take one thing you have been storing and say it while it is still small, with no preamble. A sentence about what you noticed and what you would prefer. The relief afterwards is usually larger than the discomfort during.