We Never Argued, So Nothing Changed

They never argued. Not once in seven years.

Friends envied their calm. “You two are so in tune,” they’d say, noting the pair who never yelled, never slammed doors, never stormed off. It looked like peace. “But peace,” she discovered, “is not always the comrade of silence, but just the mask it wears when love slowly dies.

Every morning, he’d pass her coffee, milk, two sugars, the way she liked it. She would thank him with a smile that never met her eyes, and no longer reached them. These small rituals became their way of feigning that something still worked. That they were still choosing each other, as they moved forward in different directions.

The rooms of their house were filled with words that went unsaid. Disappointments are hidden under the rug. Resentments fit smoothly behind routines. They never said anything about anything that hurt, because hurting out loud would have shattered the porcelain stillness that both of them held on to. It may have caused them to be real again, and neither of them knew what there was to find when truly seen.

She missed being missed. He missed being seen.

But they didn’t reach for each other — instead, they reached for chores, for shows, for sleep. They touched less. They laughed softly. The quiet stretches in conversation lengthened, until silence was not awkward — it was anticipated.

One night, resting side by side like two strangers at a motel, sharing the bed and nothing much else, she lay on her back and gazed up at the ceiling fan rotating gradually and deliberately.

“Do you think we’re happy?” she asked quietly. Almost afraid of the answer.

He blinked. The question hung between them like smoke. Then he faced the wall and didn’t say anything.

And that silence was the loudest he’d ever spoken.

She gazed into the black, and her eyes stung with tears, not because he was unresponsive, but because she already knew.

Some love dies in fire. Others fade in shadow.

They died of kindness. Of never arguing. Of never daring to shatter.