Why I Don't Always Want To Be A "Good Listener"

I overheard someone talking about “conversational narcissism” recently and, of course, Googled it to find out what it might be. It’s a name for the way people hi-jack a conversation you start and make it about themselves. So A starts talking about looking at new cars, and B says “Oh yeah, I was looking at (name fancy car and list high-end requirements)”. What B is supposed to do is talk about A’s search for a new car, not about herself.

The same site had some other articles about being a good conversationalist, so I took a look. Every one of them re-hashed the same old lines of the “it is better to be charmed than charming” variety. According to this line, a good conversationalist is someone who spends their time listening to the other person, prompting with questions and encouraging with non-verbal signals. This advice was given by nineteenth-century grandees to young men who needed to behave properly around nineteenth-century grandees and their numerous female relatives. The grandees and their female relatives had, of course, no interest in the opinions of young people without a station in life and were used to be being humoured as they wittered on about nothing in particular. This was the world where the advice “a good talker listens, not speaks” applies. Last time I looked, this is the twenty-first century and very few of us spend any time with grandees of any kind. And if we did, they would be disinclined to talk to us about anything, because the world has changed a lot since the days of long dinner parties in country houses. The old-school advice only works when there’s a hierarchy that makes one person the designated witterer and the other the designated wittered-to.

Absent the hierarchy, it’s a little trickier. You’re aiming to strike a balance between talking and listening that leaves both of you feeling okay about it. Why? Conversations, like any other human interaction, need to be reciprocally beneficial if you’re going to go on doing them. (That doesn’t mean equal talking, and it might mean you are the fascinated listener to a genuine authority on a subject in which you have an interest. There aren’t so many of those conversations. And don’t get pious and tell me that everyone can be fascinating about something and it’s my job to find out what. It’s as much my conversational partner’s job to try to be interesting to me as it is mine to be interesting to them.) As well as that, the other person may be tired or uninspired and wants you to carry some conversational load. They may find your questions intrusive, or worse, uninformed, and in either case will be gone fairly fast and pretty much forever. Putting them in the position where they do the talking may make them regard you as “hard work” or as someone who doesn’t share or say anything about themselves. Plenty of opportunities to mess up there.

From your side, being on the receiving end of a non-stop talker is okay if they are funny or interesting, but gets pretty tedious if they aren’t. They may be talking to be heard, not to start a discussion, and they don't need you at all, all they need is a nodding dog. That’s listener abuse: they should be paying a therapist, not using you for free. It’s like being at a big corporate meeting where they want to “deliver” a bunch of “messages”: after ten minutes you don’t want to be there and after twenty minutes your soul has shut down. And don't you want to share? Don't you want to be heard? Don't you want to find out that someone likes what you like? Because that's not quite the same thing as discovering that you like what someone else likes. The first is finding out that you can get along with other people. The second is finding that other people are prepared to get along with you. There is a huge difference.

A hefty dose of listener abuse made me give up on “social conversation” for a while. Why? Because I started to vanish. I was there to be an audience for other people, and audiences aren't equals. I wound up feeling alienated from myself. It meant I was with the wrong crowd. AA meetings can feel like that: the same old people bang on about the same old stuff with which I have no identification and I wonder what the hell I'm doing there when I could be, oh, washing my hair or doing press-ups.

So the next time you worry that you may be hi-jacking the conversation, check if feel you’re being treated as a person or an audience. If you think you’re being treated as an audience, then carry on hi-jacking. Or of course, you could make your excuses and leave.