Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?
Why "Are we okay?" is sometimes the wrong question to ask, and who it's actually for.
R U OK? is a genuinely good idea, not just as a charity or a day on the calendar, but as an actual practice: noticing someone in your life who seems to be doing it hard and asking them, with real care, how they’re going. That question, asked sincerely and outwardly, can change things.
I’m interested in a different question, one that looks almost identical but works very differently.
In the aftermath of a disagreement with a friend or partner, you may think the air has cleared, but as the minutes pass, that familiar prickly heat (the kind I wrote about in Prickly Heat Sucks. Just Like Loneliness) begins to rise in your chest, and you find yourself re-reading their last message or statement, trying to detect something in the punctuation or tone. Then the natural urge surfaces: Are we really okay?
Could this be you outsourcing your own discomfort?
Thomas Joiner, a psychologist at Florida State University who has spent decades studying distress in close relationships, defined ‘Excessive Reassurance Seeking’ in a landmark 2001 study as
“the relatively stable tendency to excessively and persistently seek assurances from others that one is lovable and worthy, regardless of whether such assurance has already been provided.”
The temporary relief it offers is real, but the longer-term effect is corrosive: the more we seek reassurance, the less capacity we build to sit with uncertainty, and the person on the other end gradually finds it exhausting. What starts as a bid for closeness can quietly create the very distance we were trying to close.
As I explored in Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough, conflict doesn’t just create friction; it breeds its own particular loneliness, particularly for those whose anxious attachment style makes a partner’s post-conflict silence feel unbearable rather than temporary.
“All too often, communication lies at the heart of the disconnection. If you are clashing and disagreeing, the connection is weakened at each outburst.”
There’s also a timing issue. After conflict, the logical brain often resolves things well before the nervous system does, so even when we know the disagreement is finished, our body hasn’t quite caught up yet. Reaching for reassurance in that window is less about genuinely checking in on the relationship and more about forcing an emotional resolution our nervous system craves before it’s ready to arrive on its own.
We must ask ourselves: are we reacting to what is actually happening, or to a pattern we’ve carried from somewhere else? Can we trust the history of this relationship more than we trust your current anxiety? What actually happens if things stay a little quiet for the next hour?
Not every silence after a conflict is a warning. Some of it is just two people coming back to themselves at different speeds, and building the capacity to believe the relationship is solid enough to survive that gap, without needing a status update to confirm it, is one of the quieter and more useful things you can develop in any close relationship. Michel de Montaigne put it plainly:
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
The most durable sense of safety isn’t the one you ask for. It’s the one you build in yourself when the room goes quiet.
Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?