The Etiquette of Silence
We have elaborate rules for talking. We have almost none for not talking — which is strange, because silence is where most of the important communication happens.
There is a Norwegian word, pålegg, which refers to anything you put on bread. Cheese, butter, jam, salmon, leftover dinner — all of it is pålegg. The word exists because Norwegians eat a lot of open sandwiches and needed a category for the thing that goes on top, regardless of what that thing happens to be.
I think about pålegg when I think about silence, because English doesn’t have a good word for the different kinds of not-talking. We have silence, which covers everything from comfortable stillness between friends to the loaded pause before bad news to the pointed quiet of someone who is angry and making you know it. These are completely different things. We treat them as one.
The grammar we don’t teach
Conversation has rules that we learn without being taught: when to speak, when to listen, how long a pause is too long, what it means to talk over someone versus to enthusiastically agree. Children absorb these rules by watching adults. Adults are barely aware they have them.
Silence has rules too, but we’ve never codified them. Every culture has different tolerances for quiet — different senses of when silence is companionable and when it’s awkward, when it’s respectful and when it’s rude. Finns and Japanese sit more comfortably in silence than Americans, who tend to treat any gap in conversation as a problem to be filled. These aren’t individual personality differences. They’re cultural grammars, learned as invisibly as the other kind.
The discomfort with silence is itself a kind of noise — a signal, not about the absence of things to say, but about the fear of what might become audible if you stopped talking.
What silence carries
The most important things I’ve been told were said in silence. Or rather: were said through the quality of a silence, in the pause before or after words, in what wasn’t said despite the fact that everything had been said.
A friend once told me that her marriage was ending not because of a fight but because of an absence of fighting — a point at which they both realized they’d stopped having the energy to argue, and that this was worse than arguing. She described a particular silence at the dinner table, the two of them not speaking but not in comfortable quiet either, just suspended in something that didn’t have a name.
I knew exactly what she meant, because I’d sat in that silence too, with different people, at different tables. It’s recognizable. It has a texture.
What I want is a vocabulary for these textures. Not to pathologize silence or turn it into a problem to be diagnosed, but to acknowledge what everyone already knows: that the space between words is where a great deal of the meaning lives.
The Quakers have a practice of sitting in silence together until someone is moved to speak. The silence is understood as shared rather than empty — a space being held rather than a space waiting to be filled. It’s one of the few traditions I know that treats collective quiet as a positive state rather than a failure of conversation.
Most of us don’t have that. We have silence, one word for a hundred different things, and the vague social pressure to fill it before it becomes uncomfortable.
But maybe the discomfort is information. Maybe it’s telling you something about the room, the relationship, the moment — something that the words, when they come, will only partly convey.