How these two meet
Air and air: two people who can follow each other anywhere and stay above it.
You can be followed here. No simplifying, no waiting for someone to catch up, no sensation of translating yourself down. The relief of that can pass for intimacy for a very long time, because it arrives in the same place in the chest and it is not the same thing.
Two people at that speed finish somewhere neither of them set out for, and both can retrace exactly how they got there. The thinking is genuinely shared, which is not the same as the thinking being about either of you.
A hurt arrives and gets analysed with real skill and real fairness, and by the end you agree about what happened and neither of you has been comforted. The chest is still tight. Nothing in the conversation was wrong, and nothing in it reached the tightness.
Distance can be held here indefinitely without either of you noticing, because it never looks like distance. It looks like an excellent conversation.
The question
What in you goes quiet when you start explaining it?
Understanding discomfort genuinely does help. It simply works on a different layer than the one where the discomfort lives.
What is missing is not a better conversation. It is the moment after the conversation, which you have both learned to skip.
One conscious action
leaving it unresolved
When something lands badly, say it landed badly and then do not explain it. No context, no fairness, no acknowledgement of the other side. Let the raw sentence sit there alone.
Then stay. The pull to make it reasonable will be strong and will feel like maturity. It is a way of leaving the room.
Words have never been the problem.
What is still tight in you that the conversation did not reach?