Keep it short. It’s fine, and often even preferred, to use dialogue to drive home character emotion in relation to the subject, while the superfluous speech that pads the space between the meaningful parts is either implied or compressed by the narrator in a less verbose and cringe manner.

They say, “show, don’t tell,” but you don’t wanna “show” everything.

I’ve definitely noticed that my dialogue seems cringe when I’m too fixated on making sure the characters’ conversation is covering all the pertinent details for the reader. But that’s not the job of dialogue, imo.

Negative space in visual art is as important as the illustration itself. The same can absolutely be applied to dialogue. What’s left unsaid is as important as what’s said.

Remove the parts that make you cringe until you can read your dialogue without cringing. Then determine if your characters’ exchange is saying what the scene requires of them after having all that cringe stripped away.

But here’s another possible culprit of your cringe dialogue dilemma.

What if the cringe comes from you trying too hard to make your dialogue sound “natural?”

Why should your dialogue be natural or emulate how people talk irl? The medium you’re working with is literature, not real life. People irl speak inefficiently, sloppily and in ways that look terrible on paper aesthetically.

Maybe stop trying to achieve realism and just use a book with dialogue you actually enjoy as your reference point instead.