90/10

I was in a social context the other day where a few of us were grumbling about 90/10 conversations. You know the kind, right? One person takes up 90% of the conversational space. It’s pretty much one-way traffic. You feel more like you’re being talked at than with. Your 10% contribution mostly involves nodding and emoting at the appropriate times. I was in gift shop in Montana last summer that hawked various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) containing funny, often irreverent little sayings on them. One of them said: “I’m sorry I slapped you, but it didn’t seem like you’d ever stop talking and I panicked!” I’ve never considered physical violence to end a conversation, but I have had my moments of desperation!

At any rate, the other day we got into story-swapping mode. I was talking about a time when I was out with my wife and the restaurant was so full that we ended up eating supper at the bar. A single older man started talking at us pretty much from the moment we sat down. No amount of shuffling in my chair, or “well, anyway-ing” or even coming close to physically turning my back on him slowed him down. He had things to say and would not be dissuaded. I think in the end our food came, and we had to literally tell him that we were on a date and that we were going to have supper together now.

There is much that could be said about 90/10 conversations and their apparent increasingly prevalence. Maybe the COVID years destroyed some people’s social skills (ability to read cues, assumption of reciprocity, interest in other people’s experiences and perspectives, etc.). Maybe social media is conditioning us to treat all discourse—even the stuff that happens IRL—as a zero-sum game. Maybe our attention spans have shrunk to the point where we don’t even have the capacity to listen to one another for more than a few seconds. Maybe some people really just don’t care all that much about other people’s lives and are mostly interested in themselves.

Or…

My daughter happened to be in earshot of this whiny conversation the other day. She listened without comment for the most part, but after I had finished relaying the 90/10 story at the bar from above, she quietly said. “Or maybe he was just really lonely and had nobody in his life who would listen to him.”

(Cue impulse to react defensively and self-righteously.)

Well, yes. I suppose it could be that, too.

I began to imagine the scenarios that might have led to that older gentleman being at a bar counter by himself on a Friday night. Maybe he had recently lost his wife. Maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of another night at home alone with crappy takeout food in front of the TV. Maybe he just didn’t have any friends. Maybe he didn’t know how to be a good friend. Maybe he was just desperate for a bit of human interaction, and he was trying to get it any way he could. Maybe he was reading my not-so-subtle “not interested” cues perfectly well but persisted with the 90/10 anyway because he was just so tired of not having anyone to talk to.

There’s a whole boundaries angle to all this that I am fully aware of but mostly not interested in getting into. I get that we can’t just make everyone else’s agenda ours all the time, that it’s not healthy on any level to just passively accept 90/10 conversations or relationships. There are probably times and places to gently (or not-so-gently) push back on this. But I also know that far too often we forget that behind every unpleasant behaviour is a real human story, often one involving unarticulated and unprocessed pain. I would do well to remember this more frequently.

I was thinking about this experience this morning when I closed my prayerbook. It occurred to me that when it comes to prayer, I, too, could be accused of engaging in 90/10 conversations. Too often, I spend 90% of the time itemizing all the ways in which my reality is underperforming at the moment, all the things that I would like to be different, all the things that are broken that I would like fixed, etc. Do I let God get in a word now and then? Am I interested in God’s perspective on a given situation? Is silence even an option? Or do I mostly expect God to compliantly sit there on the other end of the firehose of my grievances?

It’s not apples to apples, I know. A relationship with God is different than with another human being. Prayer is not the same as a conversation with a flesh and blood person. Yeah, I get all that. But I also think that if I don’t appreciate being the 10 in a 90/10 interaction, then I should probably try to avoid being the 90.