That’s a great point, @RedPowerLady. My male partner is a brooding type of person, when he gets upset he can’t think, so he will not answer back in our arguments, he will go silent. This offended me greatly, because I am the type of person who prefers to talk and resolve the situation then and there. But once we sat down and explained our differences, I was able to understand that his silence is not him passive aggressively dominating the argument nor ending it prematurely, but it is simply something he needs to do to keep his cool.
However, there is a difference between cooling down and actively silent treatment-ing. I believe that everyone has the right to cool down, but when it comes to resolving a problem both people need to meet and agree to working on it, and that is simply impossible if the other person is silent treatment-ing for whatever justification they can imagine. If after weeks she still refused to tell you what made her angry, in my mind there is no obligation to hunt and pester via 20-questions to find out what it was. That behaviour is childish, and I’m not dating a child, I’m dating an adult who needs to act like an adult.