You know what’s interesting about stonewalling in a second marriage? It often carries extra weight that people don’t expect. Because you’ve already been through one ending. You know what loss feels like. And that knowledge changes everything about how your nervous system responds to conflict.
Let me tell you what stonewalling actually is, because most people think it’s about the person being cold or punishing their partner. It’s not. Stonewalling is almost always a survival response. The person who goes quiet, shuts down, leaves the room, or gives you the thousand-yard stare? Their nervous system has flooded. They are physiologically overwhelmed. John Gottman’s research shows that heart rates can hit 100 beats per minute or higher during these moments. The brain essentially goes offline for higher reasoning. The shutdown is the body protecting itself.
Now here’s what makes second marriages particularly complicated. Both of you are walking in with history. You have attachment wounds from a first marriage that didn’t make it. Maybe you learned that conflict leads to abandonment. Maybe you learned that being vulnerable gets used against you. Maybe you watched love turn into contempt and you promised yourself you’d never let that happen again. So now, the moment things get tense, that old learning kicks in hard and fast.
The person stonewalling is often thinking something like: “If I open my mouth right now, this is going to spiral, and I cannot survive another spiral.” That’s not manipulation. That’s a terrified person trying to protect the relationship by protecting themselves from it.
And the person on the receiving end of the stonewalling is often reading it as rejection. As “you don’t care.” As “here we go again, just like last time.”
So you get two people who both desperately want connection, and the cycle they’re in is pushing them further apart with every episode.
If you’re the one who shuts down, the work is learning to recognize your flooding early, before you’re completely offline. Notice the physical signals. Your chest tightening. Your jaw clenching. Your thoughts starting to race or go completely blank. When you catch it early, you have a window to say something like: “I want to talk about this with you. I’m not going anywhere. But I need 20 minutes to calm down so I can actually be here with you.” And then you have to come back. That’s the crucial part. The coming back is everything.
If your partner is the one who stonewalls, the work for you is learning not to pursue harder when they shut down. I know that feels completely counterintuitive. But pursuit plus withdrawal is one of the most painful dances couples do. The more you push, the more unsafe it feels for them to come back. Slowing down, softening your approach, saying “I can see this is hard right now, I’m not going anywhere, we can come back to this” actually creates more safety for them to return to you.
What both of you are working toward together is a place where the relationship itself feels like the team you’re both on, not the battleground. Where you can say “this conversation is getting hard for both of us, let’s figure out how to do this together” rather than you against me.
Second marriages can actually have a real advantage here, if you use it right. You both know the cost of not doing the work. That awareness, as painful as it is, can be tremendous fuel for showing up differently this time.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Stonewalling in Relationships: What Your Partner’s Silence Actually Means
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