So why does a pause with one person feel like being dropped, and with another like the best moment of the conversation? Two groups of researchers measured exactly that. One of them works in Groningen, the city I call home.
Four seconds
Namkje Koudenburg is a social psychologist at the University of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. Social psychologists study how people behave around other people. In 2011 she and two colleagues published two small experiments on a question most of us know from the inside: what does a short silence do to the person who just spoke?
Why does a short pause in a conversation feel so uncomfortable?
Because you read it as a verdict on yourself. In the Groningen experiment, a four-second gap after someone's remark was enough to make people feel more rejected, less part of the group and less sure of themselves. They had not consciously noticed the gap. The feeling registered anyway.
Here is what the sixty students did. Each sat alone in a small booth at a computer and watched a six-minute video of three female students, who barely knew each other, talking about relationships. The instruction: imagine you are Linda. Four minutes in, Linda says that a teacher who sleeps with students should be fired on the spot. In one version of the video the other two simply carry on talking. In the other there are four seconds of nothing, and then they carry on in exactly the same way.
Afterward everyone answered the same questions. The students who had watched the four seconds felt more hurt and more rejected, and they were less sure the group agreed with them. Asked how long the pause had lasted, both groups guessed about the same.
Four seconds is too short to notice. It was long enough to feel.
An earlier round of the same study happened on paper. Students read a scene in which they made a slightly awkward remark, and the silence was a single line: for a moment it goes quiet, and Suzanne stirs her coffee. Even that line was enough to make readers feel left out.
The researchers' explanation is simple. A conversation that keeps flowing tells you, without anyone saying it, that you belong and that people agree with you. A silence interrupts that message. And because being cast out of a group once meant real danger, we react to even a tiny interruption as if it were a rejection.
What the talking is for
That finding changed how I read a lot of talking. If four seconds can make near-strangers feel rejected, then much of what we say has a different job than being heard: it keeps the gap from opening.
I know that reflex from a different place. For years I was ridiculed for having a phone that could only call and text, and I loved it. When I finally gave in, every moment without enough stimulation had to be filled. In line, on the tram, five minutes into a book. Talking to cover a silence is the same reflex, aimed at another person.
Why do I keep talking when I have nothing to say?
Most likely because the flow itself is doing a job. In the Groningen study, a smooth conversation gave people a sense of belonging and of being agreed with, without anyone weighing what was actually said. Keep it flowing and you get that for free. Stop, and for four seconds you find out whether you are really being seen.
The researchers added one suggestion I want to keep: when a silence falls, people may start paying closer attention to what is actually being said. The gap you were trying to prevent could be the moment someone finally listens.
Ten minutes at a café table
Now the other silence. In 2023 a team at Dartmouth College, a university in New Hampshire in the northeastern United States, published a study with a title that gives away the ending: long gaps between turns are awkward for strangers but not for friends. It appeared in a journal of the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science.
What did the people in the study actually do?
They talked. Each pair sat across a café table for ten minutes, about anything they liked, with a camera across the room: 261 pairs of strangers and 65 pairs of close friends. Afterward each person watched the recording alone and moved a slider from zero to a hundred to show how connected they remembered feeling at each moment.
Why does silence feel different with a friend?
Because the same gap carries a different message. The researchers looked at every pause longer than two seconds. Between strangers, the feeling of connection dropped as the pause began and stayed lower afterward. Between friends it climbed, and the longer the pause, the higher it climbed.
Two seconds is long in a conversation, where the usual gap between speakers is about a quarter of a second. Friends also had more of these long pauses. And three people who did not know which pairs were friends watched a hundred short clips of the gaps and saw the difference from the outside: the friends' pauses looked less awkward and came with more laughter, laughter that looked real. Strangers, after a pause, more often changed the subject.
The researchers' own example of a friends' pause is two words: remember Paris? Nothing follows, and nothing needs to. Both people are somewhere else, together. One line from their paper is worth reading twice: the long gaps we remember are the ones we entered clumsily and failed to exit gracefully. The good ones we never experience as gaps at all.
The part of you that fills the room
Put the two studies side by side and something becomes visible. With people who barely know you, a silence is a test, and most of us pass it by talking. With people who know you, the silence is where the connection peaks. The gap is the same. What changes is whether you feel safe enough to leave it open.
Two sentences of my own belong here.
True connection isn't loud. It's when two souls feel seen, even in stillness. And: We spend a lifetime chasing what silence can give in seconds.
This is how I read them together. The part of you that keeps the conversation going, that fills every pause, that makes sure nobody has to sit with nothing, is doing protective work. It keeps you inside the group. It also keeps you out of view. Nobody can see the person behind a wall of words, however friendly the words are. What the Groningen students felt in four seconds is what that part is protecting you from. What the Dartmouth friends felt in the same four seconds is what it costs you.
I know that from a different height. Ten years of looking down from a cockpit taught me that stepping back from everything familiar can, strangely, deepen the sense of connection. Distance did that in the air. Silence does the same thing at a café table.
How do I know whether I am being seen or only being heard?
Try the pause. With someone you trust, let a silence run past two seconds without rescuing it. If the connection you feel goes up, as it did for the friends in the Dartmouth study, you were seen. If you feel the pull to fill it, notice which part of you is pulling, and what it is afraid will show.
One hour without a next sentence
The Last Hour Experience is a guided hour, alone with your headphones, in which you live through your own last hour. There is no conversation to keep going. Nobody is waiting for your next sentence. So the part of you that fills every pause has, for once, nothing to do, and what surfaces when it goes quiet is usually the part that wanted to be seen all along. Afterward a set of questions helps you put words to it. Your own words, this time, with nothing to cover.
Questions people ask
Is it normal to feel closer to someone in silence than while talking?
Yes, and with the right person it may be the clearest sign of closeness you have. In the Dartmouth study, friends' sense of connection rose as a pause of more than two seconds began, and friends had more of those pauses than strangers did. A silence you do not need to fix is usually a sign of trust.
Why is a pause awkward with some people and easy with others?
Because a pause is read as a signal, and the signal depends on who you are with. In Groningen, four seconds of quiet among near-strangers felt like rejection, even unnoticed. Between friends in the Dartmouth study, the same pause was where connection peaked. The silence is identical. What differs is how safe you are in it.
Does comfortable silence mean a relationship is strong?
The Dartmouth study measured one ten-minute conversation per pair, so it cannot promise anything about your relationship. What it does show: between people who know each other, a pause was more often full than empty, and outside observers could see that too. If you can sit in silence with someone and feel closer, you are in good company.
How can I get more comfortable with quiet moments in conversation?
Start with someone who already knows you. Let a pause run two or three seconds before you fill it: longer than the usual quarter second, and long enough to notice what happens. If it feels like the Dartmouth friends, keep it. If it feels like Groningen, you have learned who you still keep talking for.
Sources
Long gaps between turns are awkward for strangers but not for friends, the 2023 study by Emma Templeton, Thalia Wheatley and their colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, published by the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, and free to read in the U.S. National Library of Medicine's collection. The café table, the slider, the 261 pairs of strangers and the 65 pairs of friends come from there.
Disrupting the flow: How brief silences in group conversations affect social needs, the 2011 paper by Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine Gordijn of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a research journal for psychologists, posted on the first author's university page. The booths, the six-minute video, the four seconds and Suzanne's coffee come from there.
The two sentences about connection and silence are my own, from a set of six sentences of mine. The years with a phone that could only call and text are told in the short film on the page The Deeper Story.