STONEWALL - STONEWALLING - STONEWALLED

1. They stonewalled until they could come up with a response.
2. They were just stonewalling for time.
3. They're trying to stonewall the media.
4. We're trying to get the information, but we're being stonewalled.

Stonewalling is a refusal to communicate or cooperate. Such behaviour occurs in situations such as marriage guidance counseling, diplomatic negotiations, politics and legal cases. Body language may indicate and reinforce this by avoiding contact and engagement with the other party. People use deflection in a conversation in order to render a conversation pointless and insignificant. Tactics in stonewalling include giving sparse, vague responses, refusing to answer questions, or responding to questions with additional questions. In most cases, stonewalling is used to create a delay, rather than to put the conversation off forever.

The earliest English stonewalls were literal; they were walls made from stone. Because a stone wall can be difficult to surmount, English speakers began using stonewall figuratively for things or people who either were persistent and enduring or who presented an obstacle as formidable as a stone wall. (Those figurative senses earned American Confederate Civil War General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson his nickname.) Then, in the late 1800s, cricket players began using stonewall as a verb in reference to a batter's defensive blocking of balls. Around the same time, stonewall found its way into political slang as a synonym of filibuster. There is also a chiefly British sense of "to engage in obstructive parliamentary debate or delaying tactics."

How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Relationship

Stonewall

The second behavior that predicts divorce with over 90% accuracy, according to John Gottman's research and the experience of most couples' counselors, is stonewalling. Different from an occasional timeout to calm down or collect your thoughts, stonewalling is absolute refusal to consider your partner’s perspective. If you listen at all, you do it dismissively or contemptuously.

The common songs of the stonewaller are:

“Just leave me alone…”

“Do whatever you want...”

“End of conversation…”

“Stop talking...”

“Get out of my face…”

“That’s enough…”

“I’ve had it!”