jeffy

The other day, a friend was giving me a hard time for making rhetorical comments without expanding on them. I had said something like "I can think of lots of better ways to spend our time [than whatever disagreeable thing we were talking about]", and she said, "but I'll never know what they are!"

I got to thinking about that comment later and felt like I should have said, "if you want to know, you just have to ask."

Is it pathological to not be proactively sharey? In conversation, I tend towards the laconic. Maybe I count on other people to draw me out too much. I tend to be skeptical about anyone's interest in my boring thoughts and stories without a lot of encouragement.

Conversation has always been a mystery to me, so if anyone can offer any insight, I'm all ears. ;-)

I wonder if part of my problem is that I've read way more books than I've had conversations. Conversations in books are predictably unnatural. Since the author gets to write both sides you get snappy back and forth Aaron Sorkin dialogue that tells jokes, moves the plot along, and builds character depth all at the same time. Maybe setting my standards from Oscar Wilde and Paarfi and Henry James and Joss Whedon is unrealistic. (You think?)

My family isn't big on inclusive dialogue either, so that doesn't help.

Do you, gentle readers, know how to converse? How did you learn? How does it work?