Conversational violence is something we rarely name, yet most people encounter it in couple relationships.

We talk a lot about abuse, coercion, and control, and rightly so. But there is a form of relational harm that often goes unnoticed because it doesn’t look dramatic or overt. It happens inside ordinary conversation.

In intimate relationships, conversational violence refers to what occurs when interaction itself becomes a site of domination. It is not a personality trait or a character flaw. It is an outcome. The violence shows up as silencing, erasure, coercion, or the progressive constraining of one partner’s experience through language and interaction.

The mechanism through which this operates is an imbalance in definitional privilege.

Definitional privilege refers to who gets to define what is happening, what something means, and whose interpretation is treated as accurate, reasonable, or legitimate. When one partner consistently holds this privilege, conversation stops being mutual. Meaning is no longer negotiated; it is settled.

Everyday conversational actions organise the interaction around one person’s version of reality. Interruption, correction, psychologising, dismissiveness, and insistent reinterpretation centre one partner’s meaning as authoritative. The other partner’s experience is repeatedly overridden, reshaped, or cast into doubt. Over time, this constrains what can be expressed, how it can be expressed, and whose experience is allowed to stand as real within the relationship.

This is not about blame, intent, or pathology. Conversational violence is structural rather than moral. It emerges when definitional privilege is unevenly distributed in the moment as well as across the relationship, and left unexamined. The harm lies in the cumulative effect: who gets complexity, who gets reduced; who speaks with authority, who is spoken about; whose experience becomes the organising reference point.

Naming conversational violence is not about labelling one partner as abusive or creating a hierarchy of harm. It is about recognising a form of relational harm that often remains invisible precisely because it is articulate, justified, and socially acceptable.

Taking conversational violence seriously requires attention not just to what is said, but to how authority, meaning, and legitimacy are distributed within the interaction itself.