A conversation can be pleasant because one person keeps relocating the difficult parts privately.

A conversation can run smoothly because one person is quietly doing the difficult work. They are absorbing the awkward parts, steering away from the trouble, managing the mood, and the pleasantness everyone experiences is their labour. Ease in a room is rarely evenly produced.

Look for who is doing it where you are, and take a turn. Raising the awkward thing yourself, or sitting with a silence rather than making someone else fill it, redistributes the work. And if it is always you, that is worth knowing, since this particular labour is invisible enough that nobody will ever notice it stopping until it does.