Have the Conversation?

That conversation you keep rehearsing in your head? You think it’s going to blow up.

It probably isn’t.

I’m often tempted to do this. I talk myself out of bringing something up because I’ve already run the movie in my head — he’d get defensive, shut down, and we’d be worse off than before. So I let it sit. And the unsaid things piled up quietly, taking up space in our relationship like furniture we’d stopped seeing.

Turns out I was miscalculating.

Research by Dungan and colleagues, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024), ran multiple experiments — including ones with actual real-world confrontations — and found that people consistently and systematically overestimate how negatively others will respond to direct, honest conversation. Two things drive this: we tend to fixate on worst-case outcomes, and we don’t account for something that activates the moment you’re in a real conversation with someone — what the researchers call relationship-maintenance processes. The other person’s instinct to protect the relationship kicks in. You both show up differently than you imagined.

We’re essentially psyching ourselves out of conversations that could strengthen the relationship.

Here’s what that costs us: not just one avoided conversation, but a pattern of self-silencing that becomes the relationship’s new normal. You stop bringing things up. They stop bringing things up. And you both call it “keeping the peace” when really you’ve just agreed to let the relationship slowly go quiet.

The exit from this loop isn’t courage in some big, cinematic sense. It’s the willingness to be wrong about how it’ll go. Say it. In person. With curiosity, not accusation. Give the relationship the chance to do what it’s built to do.

I’ve started calling this the Confrontation Illusion — the gap between how badly we think it’ll go and how it actually goes.

The gap is almost always smaller than you think.

What conversation are you avoiding because you’ve already decided it won’t go well?