different people have different
habits in
conversation (duh). In early
January, 1999, I had a long telephone conversation with a woman who knew how to talk to men, where I was
schooled on a particular
failure mode of the interactions between conversational styles:
(excuse the appearance of sweeping generalizations. Mentally insert 'many' and 'may tend to' at the appropriate syntactic junctures)
- men talk until interrupted
- men interrupt in order to identify. You say you went fishing, and another guy will start a story about how he went fishing too. He'll go on until he's interrupted.
- women will pause to wait for encouragement. If encouragement is not given, the thread dies.
- women tend not to interrupt, unless they're pissed off. They won't chime in to identify.
The sad result of this is that the man comes off as a
blabbermouth and the man learns nothing about the woman, and it is then
assumed that she is
stupid or
shallow.