Talking again after the election without reopening debate

Patient Guide

The first phone call, the first lunch with someone who voted differently. On what the election broke, what is still standing, and why reconnecting does not require reopening the debate.

October 27, 202610 min read

Illustration for the article: Talking again: reconnecting with someone who voted differently

Monday, late afternoon. The phone lights up on the table with his brother-in-law’s name, and he lets it ring twice before answering. A lot goes through his mind in those two rings. Since the beginning of October, the two of them have exchanged nothing beyond the bare minimum, and their last real conversation ended with a jab from each side. On Sunday night, one of them celebrated. The other did not. For what matters here, it makes no difference which.

He answers half on guard, with a line ready in case the subject comes up. It does not come up. His brother-in-law wants to know whether his drill is still around, because on Saturday he needs to hang a shelf in his son’s room. They talk about the drill, the right bit for a concrete wall, a time that works for both of them. In under three minutes, they hang up.

He stays there for a while with the phone in his hand. He does not know whether that was a truce, a dodge, or the beginning of something. He only knows that, for him, the election ended a little more in that moment than it had on Sunday.

Two days after the result of Brazil’s runoff between Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula, versions of that phone call are happening in many homes. The friend of twenty years who sends a “hey, where have you been?”. The Sunday lunch that will bring together the same people who argued at the table earlier this month. The coworker at the next desk who, since the last debate, only talks about work. In all of them there is the same question, almost never asked out loud: how do you go back?

What broke, and what is still standing

A long, hard-fought campaign tends to break delicate things, things you did not even know were there. The idea that the people close to you, deep down, thought alike. The ease of talking about any subject without weighing your words. The trust that certain things would never be said between those two people. When that breaks, it feels as if the whole relationship has been compromised.

It rarely has been. A close relationship is made of many threads, and politics, however much space it took up in recent months, is only one of them. The others are still there, and they tend to reappear by the most ordinary routes: the borrowed drill, the ride to the airport, the photo of the nephew, someone’s birthday, the question about how grandma’s doctor’s appointment went. None of this is trivial. It is through these practical matters that many relationships take their first test after a fight, the way you dip a foot in the water before getting in.

That is why it is worth distrusting the reading that sees the drill phone call as cowardice, or hypocrisy, as if the only honest way back were to settle the politics first. Often the practical matter says exactly what needs to be said: the bond is still here. Politics stays for later, or for never, and that does not make the return false.

Reconnecting is not reopening the debate

Many people put off the reunion because they imagine it has to begin with the conversation that was left hanging. Either the argument is picked up again and reaches an end, with someone admitting the other was right, or there is no way back. Since that end never comes, the distance keeps stretching on its own.

These are different things. The debate is about ideas and can stay open for years, as it does between so many people who care about each other. The bond is about the people and does not depend on the debate being closed. You can go back to having lunch together, laughing at the same stories, counting on each other, with each of you keeping exactly what you think.

This does not mean pretending nothing happened. When something was said that hurt, it may need to be named at some point, and that is separate work, the work of repair. But acknowledging what happened is different from reopening the dispute. Something like “it was a hard month between us” acknowledges the distance without bringing the argument back to the table. What almost never needs to be said is the analysis of the result, the “I told you so,” the prediction of what will happen to the country. All of that is the campaign trying to continue by other means.

Talking without needing to convert

There is a wish that outlives elections and deserves a careful look: the wish to convert. It takes different forms depending on which side of the result a person ended up on. In someone who celebrated, it may show up as the desire to hear the other admit that, in the end, it was not so bad after all. In someone who lost, as the silent wait for the first stumble, so as to be able to say later on that they were right. In both cases, the conversation is still a dispute, only postponed.

Deep down, wanting to convert means wanting the other person to become like us, so that being close to them is easy again. It is understandable. But it carries a condition no adult relationship can sustain for long: I can only be with you if you think the way I do.

The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott published, in 1958, a short essay called The Capacity to Be Alone. In it he describes a paradox: the capacity to be alone, which he linked to emotional maturity, grows out of the experience of being alone in the presence of someone. It is the baby, or the small child, absorbed in their own world while the mother, or whoever cares for them, is there, reliable, present without demanding anything. Winnicott described this kind of relationship as one between two people in which at least one, perhaps both, is alone with themselves, and for whom the presence of the other still matters. And he added that this is the stuff of which friendship is made.

Brought to the Sunday lunch table, the idea helps show what is at stake. Converting the other would be a kind of fusion: only being able to be close if we think alike. Breaking off would be the opposite move: not being able to bear the presence of someone who thinks differently. Between the two lies a harder and more mature place, which is sharing a table with someone whose inner world is not ours, without invading it and without letting ourselves be invaded. Each person leaves the lunch thinking what they thought when they arrived. And, even so, they were with the other.

The first lunch can simply be good enough

The first lunch after a fight usually arrives loaded with expectations. Either it will be the emotional reunion in which everything is resolved, or it will be the disaster that confirms there was no way back. It is almost never one or the other. It is a somewhat awkward lunch, with silences a little longer than usual, a joke that lands badly, a topic avoided in a way everyone notices.

Winnicott has another idea that helps here. In a 1953 paper on transitional objects, he described the “good-enough mother”: not the perfect mother who guesses every need, but the one who adapts almost completely to the baby at the beginning and, little by little, fails in measures the baby can bear. In other writings, he also spoke of a good-enough environment. For Winnicott, it is these tolerable failures, within care that continues, that allow the child to keep encountering reality without falling apart.

The idea was conceived for the earliest stage of life, and it would be a stretch to carry it over whole to a lunch between adults. But it leaves a clue. What rebuilds trust between two people is not a flawless encounter. It is an encounter with flaws the relationship can withstand: the awkward silence, the slightly crooked remark, the subject steered around and, at the end, a “see you on Saturday.” A good-enough reunion is one after which you still want another.

When it is not possible, and that is all right

Not every relationship is ready to go back two days after an election, and not every one needs to. The clocks tend to run at different speeds. Someone who came out of the result satisfied tends to want to turn the page quickly, and is sometimes puzzled that the other does not pick up the phone with the same lightness. Someone who lost may be in the middle of a grief that has not yet ended, and the other’s hurry sounds like indifference. The reverse also happens: there are those who won and are still hurt by what they heard during the campaign, and those who lost and want precisely to get back to normal soon. Waiting for the other person’s time, and recognizing your own, is also part of going back.

And there are relationships in which, for now, going back is not possible. When every encounter becomes a new round of contempt. When every attempt ends in the same argument, with the same lines. When the election simply gave a name to a distance that existed long before it. In these cases, not going back now is neither failure nor spite. It may be the possible way of preserving what remains of the relationship until something changes. A door left ajar is not a locked door.

When the reunion weighs more than it should

For most people, the return happens slowly, at the pace of birthdays, lunches, and borrowed tools. In some cases, however, the reunion starts to take up a disproportionate amount of space. When the idea of a lunch brings days of anticipatory distress. When sleep disappears for several nights before a family gathering. When a person realizes they cannot stay in the same room as someone who thinks differently without needing to win or to leave. When the estrangement spreads from one person to the whole family and the distress starts to take over the day.

In those moments, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers something of its own. Not a script for the next conversation, nor a verdict on who was right, but a place to understand what that person’s difference touches. Why being close to someone who thinks differently feels so threatening. What is lost, inside, when the other does not agree. What older story repeats itself in the difficulty of going back. Often, when this becomes clearer, the return no longer depends on the other person changing.

On Saturday, he returns the drill and ends up staying to help with the shelf. Nobody mentions the election. It was not missed.