How do you deal with non-listeners?

In My Humble Opinion
1

And by that, I don’t mean people who, say, don’t listen to instructions.

What I do mean is, for example, I have a friend who will not listen in conversations. His pauses to let you speak aren’t spent listening to you say anything. They’re there so he can come up with what he’s going to say next. Seriously. More than once I’ve realized he has no idea what I’ve been talking about because his side of the discussion is pretty much the only thing he’s paying attention to. I mean, he’s conscious enough that if I put nonsense words in place of sentances, he -does- notice (and yes, I’ve actually had to do it as a test / breaker once in a while), but beyond that, I could tell him the true secrets of alchemy and the location of atlantis, and he’d keep on babbling. It’s frustrating and annoying, and I’m not real sure how to handle it.

2

…

wait, what?

3

Sorry, I wasn’t listening.

I don’t know if there’s much you can do unless your friend realizes that it’s a problem and is willing to change.

You could possible pepper your statements with “know what I mean?” or “that ever happen to you?”

But I feel ya. I used to hang out with a guy like that, and would spend an hour every other Friday in a car with him. Especially hard as there were maybe two topics that interested him.

4

Try being on a date with someone like that.

5

I tend to just provide very short, curt answers to the questions. I figure there’s no sense in me wasting effort and energy with my response if the response is going to be ignored anyway.

6

Yeah, I get real quiet with those folks, and I probably wouldn’t refer to one as “friend.”

7

I don’t talk to people like this… primarily because they aren’t listening.

8

My MIL is like this to a certain extent. She’ll keep on going on her tangent without much regard for what you’re saying or clues that the conversation has ended or moved on to something else. I just nod and say “uh huh.” Comparing her to my Aspergers son, I think she doesn’t have a good idea of how to have a conversation.

Vlad/Igor

9

I have a friend who is just like this. Despite spending a ton of time together, we’re not terribly close and frankly are on the outs as friends anyway.

It’s a symptom of being oblivious, socially inept and kind of selfish, in my experience. Such people want someone to listen to them, but don’t really want to reciprocate. I tried to bring it up several times, but he never really understood the problem.

In the end, he got married to someone just as oblivious and selfish and they became completely self-absorbed about their kids, so we don’t do much with them anymore. It’s pretty clear to me now that he was my friend because I liked things that he liked, but now that his life has moved in a different direction, there’s no friendship because the common ground is gone.

10

Try working for someone like that.

11

My father’s getting to be like this; in his case, he’s just aging quickly. It’s frustrating as hell, because he used to be a terrific conversationalist and now he’s just rerunning his Greatest Hits in every conversation. It’s really, really bad on the phone, just mildly irritating in person.

People who’re ALWAYS like this, you can’t do anything about and there’s no point trying. They’re too difficult to deal with to make any effort beyond life-or-death necessity because it’s impossible to tell if they understand anything you said.

12

I just don’t tell them anything that matters.

13

Why is this person your friend? 90% of what a friend does is listening.

14

If it is all the time, I would drop the person. If it was a friend I wanted to keep, I would give him shit, make fun of him to common friends in front of him and generally bust his balls until he got the message.

15

Other than stop being friends, that’s probably the best thing you can do. Asking specific questions might put at least distract him away from whatever he has planned to say, and maybe from there you can transition into listening mode.
I’m sure if you act completely interested in what he’s saying he’ll love you for it, but one-way conversations can get old really quick.

16

Yup, one of our neighbours is a couple where the guy is like this. Everything you say you only get halfway through before he starts trying to interrupt so he can tell an anecdote designed to top yours. We invited them over for a BBQ. We haven’t invited them to anything else. I feel sorry for the wife. She seems nice. The solution is not to be a friend of this person.

17

Used to have a friend who pretty much gave up listening as the next logical step in his complete inability to remain in communication with people.

He’d stopped answering the phone or calling people back because he hated the phone.
Then he stopped listening to his voicemail, because it was the same thing.

For a very long time, he bitterly complained about how he never saw anyone anymore and how he’d lost contact with a lot of people. When I pointed out how much work it was (about a month’s worth of unanswered calls) to get ahold of him and get together with him, the point went right over his head. He just started bitterly complaining about how much he hated the phone.

No e-mail account, no internet account either.

A mutual “friend” had a party to which they’d apparently invited everyone they knew even remotely. Except me. Guy comes over and keeps telling me endlessly what a great party it was, and pausing to ask why I wasn’t there. Probably asked me that more than 10 times. I finally blew up at him, because all along I’d been telling him that I hadn’t been invited and that I didn’t care to hear about a party that I deliberately had not been invited to. But he wasn’t listening. :rolleyes:

Then one day he came over and started talking. And talking. And talking. Talked right over everything I said. He decided to go to the restroom, which was upstairs. Got up and walked upstairs, still talking. Though I had no clue what he was saying, I could tell that he was still talking while in my bathroom. Then he comes back down, still talking, wraps up his long winded story and asks me about it.

Yeah, about that. I didn’t hear a word you were saying while you were upstairs.

“Yeah, but you know what I’m saying.” :smack:

Broke the friendship for a very long list of reasons, far later than I should have. Frankly, I’d have put this rather low on the list of reasons I walked away from him for at the time, but right now it would be enough for me to say bye over.

If you (generic you) hang around with people, but never listen to what they’re saying, it’s because you’re only hanging around with them so you have someone to talk AT, not with. You clearly don’t give a shit about who they are.

18

I just reapeat what they need to know, and silently remind myself that they are paying me a few hundred an hour to not listen to me.

19

I don’t deal with it, I walk away.

20

My ex’s step-dad was like that because as he aged he started having trouble hearing. He could catch the basics of a conversation but miss details.

So he would concentrate on your words, when he got an actual chunk of something, he’d then spend all his time trying to figure out how he could say something that would sound like it was relevent to that chunk, so he could appear to contribute to a conversation… often by using that snippet that he caught to redirect the conversation to something more familiar, so we got the same great stories, over and over and over. Totally the Greatest Hits thing.

So, not like the OP, where the guy just doesn’t really care about your contribution to the story. It’s more motivated by “I don’t know what to say, but this has always gone over well.”