Silence can mean peace, confusion, restraint, anger, or nothing at all; stop assuming you know which.

Silence is a blank that gets read according to whatever you are already worried about. It might be contentment, thinking, tiredness, restraint, or nothing at all, and the interpretation that arrives first is usually about you rather than about them.

When someone goes quiet, resist the automatic reading and ask instead. Keep it simple and unloaded: a plain enquiry rather than a request for reassurance. The answer is frequently far more ordinary than the story you had begun to build, and asking costs much less than acting on a wrong guess.