protect your peace

Peace used to be something a person held, and holding it meant keeping quiet. The marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer (opens in a new window) asks anyone who knows a reason the couple should not be joined to speak now, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace. The new phrase keeps the noun and moves it inside. Peace becomes a condition of the self, other people become what it has to be guarded from, and the verb changes from holding to protecting. The idea under it is sound. Some people are bad for a person, and leaving them is reasonable.

It spread through self-care writing and was in wide circulation by 2021 (opens in a new window), on affirmation cards, journal covers and captions. In January 2026 the Gottman Institute, which trains couples therapists, published a guide (opens in a new window) to telling protecting one’s peace apart from avoidance. A phrase that needs a guide to its misuse has already been misused at scale.

Under load, it supplies a reason for leaving that can’t be answered, since answering it would disturb the thing it protects. A disagreement becomes an intrusion, and an explanation becomes a cost the other party is not entitled to. When 2 people both protect their peace, neither raises the matter that needed raising, and each records the result as a boundary held.

I do not use the phrase, and I have not needed it. By September 9 this file recorded 4 accounts closed by me, 3 of them in 6 days. That day I unmatched a woman who had messaged the night before to say she had got home safe, and I gave no reason, because the button does not ask for one. It is the policy the phrase describes, carried out without the vocabulary, after 135 minutes and $148.33.