Why does a couple that fought about everything finally stop fighting, and is that peace or just the end of something?

Before the fighting, silence. After the fighting, silence. The difference is not the quiet — it is what the quiet contains. Mahakasyapa smiled at the flower because nothing needed saying. But you are not smiling. You are standing in a still room tallying the cost of stillness, and that accounting is itself the teaching. Fighting was the last place two people still believed the other one could change. When that belief dissolves, the room doesn't fill with peace — it fills with you. The practice doesn't ask you to grieve or to celebrate. It asks you to see clearly what is here now, without calling it by yesterday's name.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

— Zen proverb

The fighting belonged to two names, two histories, two people convinced the gap between them was real and required filling with noise. But who watched the fighting? There was always a witness — call it awareness, call it the Self — that never took a side, never tired, never slammed a door. Tat tvam asi: thou art that. Not the one who fought, not the one now quiet, but the one for whom both the noise and the silence appear as passing weather. The question of whether this is peace or ending is a question the ego asks. Ask instead who is asking. That one is already still, and always was.

“The Self is never born nor dies at any time. It has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being.”

— Bhagavad Gita 2.20

The fighting stopped because something more frightening replaced it: the decision, made on some ordinary Tuesday at 7am with the coffee going cold, to stop choosing each other enough to bother. Freedom is not comfortable — it is the condition in which you are entirely, terrifyingly the author of what happens next, with no argument to hide behind, no adversary to confirm you still exist in relation to. That silence is not rest. It is the open verdict. Two people in a quiet room are not resting from their freedom; they are standing inside it, pretending the walls are made of peace. You have to answer for what you do with this.

“Existence precedes essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

The screaming stopped not because the wound healed but because both of you finally fell through it — and the floor of a wound, Rumi would say, is not silence but the Beloved's own breath, which sounds, to the exhausted ear, exactly like defeat. The reed is hollow because it was cut from the reed bed; the hollow is not the damage, it is what makes music possible. What you are calling peace may be the reed finally empty enough to sing. Or it may be that the wine jar cracked and the wine is simply gone. One of these is transformation wearing the face of loss. The difference is whether, in the quiet, you still feel the ache of separation — because that ache is the proof of love's direction.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

— Rumi, Masnavi

You already know it is not peace — you have felt peace, and it does not feel like two people in the same room constructing reasons to look away from each other. What you are calling silence is one or both of you having decided, somewhere around 2am on a night neither will name aloud, that the cost of caring exceeds what you are willing to spend. Epictetus is clear: it is not events that disturb us but our judgments of them, and this silence is a judgment — the conclusion that engagement is no longer worth its price. That is not virtue producing stillness. Virtue costs something and pays something. This is a will that stopped working. Attend to the difference, because one can be recovered and one cannot.

“First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.”

— Epictetus, Discourses