Bismih Ta’la. I wish to speak today about a man’s silence. Very often a man will stop communicating and become silent. At first a woman may think that her husband is deaf and that is why he is not responding.

Please understand well that the method how men and women process information is quite different. Women normally think out openly and share their information with an interested listener. A Woman finds out what she wants to say through the process of just talking, letting her thoughts flow freely and expressing them out loud. This is perfectly normal and necessary at times.

However, men process information differently. They first think about what they have heard and silently work out the most suitable response. This silent process may take minutes or hours. And, to make matters worse, if he did not hear properly what his wife said or does not have enough answers to the issue, a man may not respond at all.

What women need to understand is that when a man is silent, he is saying, “ I don’t know what to say yet, but I am thinking about it.” But women understand this silence differently to mean, “I am not responding to you because I don’t care about you, and I am going to ignore you. What you are saying to me is not important and therefore I am not answering.”

When this happens, she gets stressed, thinking, “He hates me. He does not love me. He is hiding something from me. He is trying to tell a lie. He is wants to reject me and I will not be loved.”

Another important factor to understand is that a woman wants to be silent when what she wants to say will be hurtful to a person or when she does not trust a person and does not want anything to do with him. As such, a man’s silence could trigger the worst nightmare in a woman, as she will think in this same way when a man is silent. It is not surprising that a woman become disturbed when a man becomes quite.

Conversely, when a woman listens to another woman, she will always make sure to say that she is listening and she cares. And in case the speaker pauses for a while too, the listener will encourage her to talk by her reassurance.

If only when a woman understands a man’s silence in a positive manner, she will then not be depressed into thinking negatively.

(To be continued, Insha Allah)