The Most Dangerous Conversations Are the Ones You're Not Actually Having

It’s Sunday, and maybe that makes this an uncomfortable day to talk about sex.

Then again, maybe Sunday is exactly the day we should.

About a decade ago, I worked with a couple who were ministers at a large church in Georgia. I still remember them, although their names and several identifying details have been changed here for privacy. I’ll call them David and Rachel.

From the outside, theirs was the kind of marriage other people admired. They had been together for years, raised children, served side by side, prayed with struggling couples, and taught people about faith, covenant, and marriage. Sunday mornings often ended with someone stopping them in the hallway to thank them for their example.

One particular Sunday stayed with Rachel. They had spent part of the morning talking with another couple whose marriage was struggling. On the drive home, David reached across the console and rested his hand on Rachel’s thigh. Her body stiffened before she had time to think.

David felt it.

He moved his hand.

Neither of them said a word.

They drove the rest of the way home talking about church, where they should eat lunch, and something one of the kids needed that week. Two people who could sit with another couple and help them talk about their marriage couldn’t find the words for what had just happened inside their own car.

That was the strange truth of David and Rachel’s marriage.

They talked about having sex. Conversations happened about how often they weren’t having it. David talked about wanting more of it, while Rachel talked about being tired. Occasionally they argued about whether she was rejecting him, and sometimes she promised she would try harder.

But they never really talked about sex.

Nobody talked about what happened inside Rachel’s body when David touched her unexpectedly. She couldn’t explain why certain kinds of touch made her freeze or why she sometimes enjoyed intimacy once it began but spent hours beforehand wishing she could somehow avoid it. Even more painfully, David didn’t know that there were times Rachel went into the bathroom afterward and cried.

There were many things David didn’t know.

Rachel had experienced sexual trauma years before she met him. He knew the history in the factual sense. If someone had asked whether he knew what happened to his wife, he would have said yes.

Knowing someone’s history, however, is very different from understanding how that history still lives inside their body.

Rachel had become remarkably good at appearing fine. She was warm, capable, funny, deeply involved in ministry, and accustomed to being the person other women trusted with their pain. Sitting beside someone describing the worst thing that had ever happened to them came naturally to her. Speaking honestly about what happened inside her own bedroom did not.

The lie in their marriage wasn’t that they loved each other.

They did.

The lie was that silence meant everything was okay.

Emotional unsafety doesn’t always look like screaming, cruelty, or obvious abuse. Sometimes it looks like a woman lying quietly beside a good man she loves, unable to explain why her body feels afraid. Other times, it looks like a husband lying beside the woman he loves, wondering why she doesn’t seem to want him and being too ashamed to admit how deeply that hurts.

David wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt Rachel.

He was oblivious to much of what was happening inside her, while carrying wounds and beliefs of his own. Somewhere along the way, David had come to associate being sexually desired by his wife with being loved by her. Rachel’s withdrawal touched a place in him that immediately wondered whether he was desirable, whether she still wanted the marriage, or whether something was wrong with him.

He didn’t know how to say, I’m afraid you don’t want me.

So he argued about frequency.

When weeks passed without sex, hurt became frustration. Eventually, frustration found religious language.

David began quoting Scripture. He referenced Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7 about husbands and wives not depriving one another. Marital duty entered the conversation, along with reminders that sex was part of God’s design for marriage.

The problem wasn’t Scripture.

The problem was what happened when Scripture became disconnected from the human being sitting in front of him.

Paul’s teaching about marital intimacy is profoundly mutual. Husband and wife are addressed with reciprocal responsibility toward one another. A covenant of mutual belonging was never meant to become an argument that one person’s body must override its fear for the comfort of another.

Scripture without tenderness can become another place where a wounded person learns that their pain doesn’t matter.

David believed he was talking about marriage.

Rachel’s body heard, You owe me.

Those words landed directly on top of an older wound.

Trauma doesn’t remain politely in the decade when it happened. It travels with us. Its echoes can appear in bedrooms, arguments, pregnancies, anniversaries, touch, silence, tone of voice, and seemingly insignificant moments that make little sense to anyone who doesn’t understand the history beneath them.

An unexpected hand can activate something old. A disappointed sigh may awaken shame. Continued asking after hesitation can remind the body of a time when no wasn’t respected. Even affection can become confusing when someone’s nervous system learned long ago that tenderness sometimes came with expectations attached.

A trigger tells us that something has been activated. It doesn’t automatically tell us who is responsible for it or whether the present moment is actually dangerous. That distinction matters tremendously in relationships and is one of the most misunderstood things.

Rachel’s history mattered. David’s behavior mattered. Her interpretation of what was happening mattered, and so did his lack of understanding. The past and present were meeting inside the same bedroom, and neither of them knew how to separate one from the other.

Her nervous system was saying, I’m unsafe.

His was saying, I’m unwanted.

Instead of talking about either of those things, they fought about sex.

This happens in relationships far more often than most people realize. We argue about the surface because the truth underneath feels too vulnerable to say. Rachel would say, “I’m tired,” and David heard, I don’t want you. He would respond, “We never have sex anymore,” while Rachel heard, Your body belongs to me.

Neither person was responding entirely to the words being spoken.

They were responding to everything those words touched.

That’s why the most dangerous conversations in relationships are often the ones we’re not actually having. An argument about sex may actually be about safety, while the fight over money is about power. The phone becomes a conversation about trust. Chores become evidence that someone feels alone. Even an argument about visiting a parent may really be asking whether your spouse believes you come first.

Couples can spend twenty years becoming experts at fighting about a symptom while never naming the wound underneath it.

For David and Rachel, change began when we stopped talking about how often they were having sex.

I asked Rachel what she needed in order to feel safe enough to want intimacy.

She went quiet.

Then she cried.

Nobody had ever asked her that.

Somewhere along the way, the entire conversation had become about what a healthy wife should provide rather than what allowed this particular woman to feel safe, connected, desired, and free inside her own body.

Rachel needed slowness. Affection had to exist without always becoming a prelude to sex. She needed to know she could say no without paying an emotional price afterward and wanted David to become curious about her body instead of assuming marriage had given him a map to it. Tenderness needed to begin long before they entered the bedroom.

Most of all, she needed her no to be safe enough that her yes could become honest.

That realization changed something in David. For the first time, he began understanding that Rachel’s hesitation wasn’t necessarily rejection. Sometimes it was protection. Her nervous system had spent years learning that closeness could become dangerous, and his disappointment had unintentionally reinforced the very fear he wanted intimacy to heal.

For years, his question had been, Why doesn’t my wife want me?

A better question eventually emerged: What happens inside the woman I love when I reach for her?

Those questions may sound similar, but they lead to entirely different marriages. One centers deprivation. The other requires curiosity. One searches for what isn’t being received. The other asks who this person beside me actually is.

Rachel had work to do as well.

David could become safer, but he couldn’t heal wounds she refused to face. Years of accommodating, avoiding, pretending, and hoping marriage itself would somehow erase what happened before him had created their own consequences. Rachel wasn’t responsible for the trauma that happened to her, but healing required her to become responsible for what she did with it now.

She had to stop expecting David to understand truths she had never fully spoken.

That meant learning her triggers, understanding what happened inside her body, finding language for what she needed, and separating the man beside her from the people who had hurt her. Honesty also meant acknowledging the moments when David wasn’t actually doing anything unsafe, even though her body was responding as if he were.

Emotional safety requires both people.

One person cannot demand it, while the other cannot silently wait for someone to guess how to provide it. Creating safety requires enough courage to tell the truth and enough humility to hear a truth that may be difficult to receive.

Months later, Rachel told me something I’ve never forgotten. Their sex life had actually become less frequent for a while, but it was more intimate than it had ever been.

That made perfect sense to me.

They had stopped performing marriage and started telling the truth inside it.

Sex became less about proving their relationship was healthy and more about actually experiencing each other. David learned that desire grows differently in a body that feels safe. Rachel discovered that honesty didn’t automatically cost her connection. Slowly, the bedroom stopped being the place where all their unspoken wounds collided.

It became somewhere they could meet.

There are marriages everywhere carrying conversations like this. Couples discuss schedules when they need to talk about loneliness. They debate frequency when the real subject is safety. Scripture gets quoted when curiosity is needed. Someone accuses their spouse of rejection while the other is terrified to admit, I don’t know how to let you close without losing myself.

The marriage may look perfectly fine from the outside.

David and Rachel’s did.

Perhaps that’s why I still remember them all these years later. They reminded me that some of the deepest fractures in a relationship aren’t created by the terrible things two people say to each other.

They’re created by the truths neither person believes are safe enough to say.

Sometimes the bravest thing two people can do is stop arguing long enough to ask, What conversation are we actually having underneath this one?

Intimacy doesn’t deepen because we become better at winning the argument. It deepens when two people make the truth safe enough to say and become brave enough to hear it.

→What conversation are you having underneath the conversation?

Maybe you’re arguing about sex, money, chores, your phone, family, or how much time you spend together. But what if the thing you’re fighting about isn’t actually the thing that hurts?

Sometimes underneath the argument is a much quieter truth: I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel wanted. I don’t feel chosen. I don’t feel heard.

Before the next argument becomes another version of the last one, ask each other one different question:

What are we actually trying to tell each other right now?

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.