My brother, whom I love and who is an otherwise great person, can ramble for an hour without seemingly taking a breath. More than once when he’s called me on his cell phone the call has gotten dropped and it’s taken him ten minutes to call me back because he’s so absorbed in his stream of consciousness like babbling that he hasn’t even realized I’m not there anymore. I think this behavior while annoying, is insufficient reason to cut him out of my life. If I had a “friend” who did that I’d dump 'em. If you think the friendship is worth salvaging I’d do as others have suggested and engage him in a way that he has to sort of follow your lead.
I have most of my co-workers in the group of not listening to me, except worse, they will not let me finish a sentence before they continue with their half of the conversation.
And my brother did that to me. He roped me into riding with him to a family funeral, a ride of a half hour, which is twenty five minutes longer that I usually will listen to him. I refuted every single political outrage he spoke for thirty minutes, and at the end he was firmly convinced that I had changed politics and now completely agreed with him. I just shook my head and got a different ride home.
One thing I’ve never been able to figure out: sometimes I’ll be in a group of people and person A is chatting with person B. Trying to get in on the conversation, I’ll say to Person A, “hey, what about [some related topic]?” Person A briefly glances at me and then turns back to give full attention to Person B: “Oh yeah, let me tell you about [the topic I just mentioned]” and then goes chatting away, still ignoring me. WTF?
Well that is just a rude person. Person A is telling you they have no interest in anything you have to say and why are you talking to me? Either that they felt you were eavesdropping and/or interupting.
My MIL is one of these people. She will keep talking at you, asking question after question of you, but when you try and answer her (because, hey, isn’t that what she wanted?), she will just start talking over you again about something else.
What’s worse, is that she appears to pick up on random parts of what you were actually saying, and then stitch them together later into something entirely different. The number of times she has come back to us later and asked why we didn’t do x (x being something we maybe mentioned earlier in the week as being something that we’d thought about doing but discounted), and then get miffed that we didn’t tell her we’d changed our plans! You can’t win.
I’ve taken to letting my sentences trail off everytime she cuts me off and changes the subject. If it is important enough, I will then wait for a pause and go back to what I was saying and re-iterate until she actually listens. Doesn’t make for very restful conversation, though.
If this was a friend, though, forget it. Why bother?
Hey, you’re friends with my Mom!
I’ve moved to Scotland, but that may not be feasible. She and her own mother are the only people I’ve ever put up with who had that habit, though, and only because “not putting up with your mother at all” is socially frowned upon.
I suggest dropping that acquaintance (if he never listens to you, he’s not any kind of friend) if you can.
Gotta love when they complain that “you never tell me anything,” too. One of the last times Mom did that, she got back a four-people chorus of “you never let us talk at all!” and The Nephew looked at all his adults and went “wow…”
My SO has a friend like this. You will be talking to her (the SO’s friend) and in mid-sentance she’ll turn away and start another conversation, or tune you completely out. I have come to realize that she is just very needy and needs to be part of every conversation in the room so she can be the center of attention. I’ve solved the issue by just not talking to her anymore beyond the “hello, how are you” pleasantries.
The way I deal with people who habitually wait for their turn to speak, is - I say things cleverer and more interesting than they do.
It’s kind of a pre-requisit for being a good conversationalist, you have to make the things you say interesting enough for non-listeners to listen.
I also demonstrate that I’ve listened to their parts, that way they feel obliged to return the courtesy.
That was my first thought. Maybe raise the bar a tad?
Ah, but a true non-listener doesn’t listen to what you say enough to notice that you’ve paid attention to what they said.
I’m a bad listener. I forget things pretty quickly, zone out if someone talks for very long, and have trouble keeping from interrupting (both because it’s hard to hold back and because I will forget what I was going to say otherwise). I was a terrible student and have trouble developing friendships.
I have worked hard at improving in these areas, but it’s hard to teach yourself social skills as an adult. Ritalin helped for a while, but I couldn’t keep taking it.
I think that a lot of people who have similar issues may not realize that they do, or may not be able to pin down what is going wrong in their social interactions. That’s not to say that some of the socially clueless aren’t assholes. It’s just not necessarily intentional or permanent.
Silvorange, you’re supposed to focus on what people say, not on what you’re going to say. You pointed out the problem in your very first sentence.
I work with someone who isn’t so much a “non-listener” as he is just totally oblivious. Most of the time he is absorbed in his own thoughts–so much so that he misses major points in meetings, begins conversations out of the blue with complete non-sequiturs, and keeps talking to people as they walk away from his desk. He’ll go on for five or ten minutes sometimes–I’ve gone to the break room for coffee and come back to find him still blabbering away.
Most of the time I deal with him by making eye contact and making short, concise statements.
From his mention of Ritalin, it may be that Silvorange’s problem is in focusing, period.
Silvorange, do you have trouble listening when you don’t have to respond? Can you pay attention to and follow things like lectures, talk radio, TV, stories read aloud, etc.?
If you have trouble in those sorts of situations, your problem may be that you have trouble focusing (ADD or something like that) or that you’re very much not an auditory learner (because you never developed the skill or your brain isn’t wired that way). If, however, you only have trouble in conversational settings, your problem may indeed be self-preoccupation.
Lectures drive me mad. School in general always did until I ended up in a small school with small classes where we could ask more questions and toss ideas around. I don’t think people were really looking for ADD in girls back then. I was diagnosed last year at the age of 35.
Nava, what do you do when you want to respond to what someone is saying, but they’re not done talking? Do you try to remember what you were going to say, or just let it go, or what?
Nava wasn’t listening. Nava was busy focusing on what Nava was going to say, and completely missed what you said about Ritalin and the obvious connection with AD/HD and it’s effect on conversational focus.
My son is AD/HD and I work with AD/HD kids. While someone is talking, they hear the first thing they can relate to and the rest of what they hear is blah blah blah while their mind is racing on to 47 other things, not necessarily related to the point they’re trying desperately to hang on to so that they can verbalize it and actually engage in social interaction. Before you all label your non-listening friends as selfish and egocentric (which certainly may be the case in some situations), allow for the possibility of jacked up neurotransmitters.