Conversation Styles Differ

Hot Air

Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:

You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.