by Kate Murphy
Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure. The French writer André Maurois wrote, “A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.” How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met? This is true not just in romantic relationships but in all relationships. Even toddlers object to being treated like the infants they were just months earlier. Offer a two-year-old a helping hand with something they’ve already learned how to do and you’ll likely get an exasperated, “I do it!” Listening is how we stay connected to one another as the pages turn in our lives.
One of the most widely cited researchers on the topic of human relations is British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. He told me a primary way we maintain friendships is through “everyday talk.” That means asking, “How are you?” and actually listening to the answer. Dunbar is known for “Dunbar’s Number,” which is the cognitive limit to the number of people you can realistically manage in a social network. He pegs it at around 150. This is the number of people you are capable of knowing well enough to comfortably join for a drink if you bumped into any one of them at a bar. You don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to maintain meaningful connections with more people than that.
But among those 150 people, Dunbar stressed that there are hierarchical “layers of friendship” determined by how much time you spend with the person. It’s kind of like a wedding cake where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people—say, a spouse and best friend—with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection, and concern. Friendships at this level require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends who you see less often and thus, your ties are more tenuous. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. At this point, you are friendly, but not really friends, because you’ve lost touch with who they are, which is always evolving. You could easily have a beer with them, but you wouldn’t miss them terribly, or even notice right away, if they moved out of town. Nor would they miss you.
An exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left off even though you haven’t talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendships forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like during college or early adulthood, or maybe during a personal crisis like an illness or divorce. It’s almost as if you have banked a lot of listening that you can draw on later to help you understand and relate to that person even after significant time apart. Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.
Sitting among the crumpled throw pillows in Judith Coche’s office, I learned that reconnecting, at least for the couples in her groups, is not a quick or easy process. She requires that they commit to a full year of attending monthly, four-hour-long group sessions plus one weekend retreat. Moreover, Coche carefully vets couples before allowing them to join. She said she needs to make sure they are “ready and able to do this kind of work.” And by that, she meant ready to listen, not only to their spouses but also to the others in the group.
The couples who seek Coche’s help tend to suffer from closeness-communication bias in the extreme. Having once felt totally in sync, now they feel hopelessly disconnected. Both sides feel unheard by the other, leaving them out of touch, often physically as well as emotionally. They come to the group effectively deaf to each other’s wants and needs. But an interesting thing happens as the couples air their grievances to the group, Coche told me. The other couples are listening even if the person’s spouse is not, which elicits a clearer expression of problems. As mentioned earlier, an attentive listener changes the quality of the conversation.
You’ve probably experienced the phenomenon when someone close to you (maybe your spouse, child, parent, friend, etc.) revealed something that you didn’t know when the two of you were talking to someone else. You might have even said, “I didn’t know that!” This likely occurred because the other person was listening differently than you previously had. Maybe that person showed more interest, asked the right questions, was less judging, or was less apt to interrupt.
Think of how you, yourself, might tell different people different things. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the type of relationship you have with them or degree of closeness. You might have once told a stranger something you hadn’t told anyone else. What you tell, and how much you tell, depends on how you perceive the listener at that moment. And if someone is listening superficially, listening to find fault, or only listening to jump in with an opinion, then you’re unlikely to make any kind of meaningful disclosure and vice versa.
In an in-depth study of a cohort of thirty-eight graduate students and confirmed in a larger online survey of two thousand people representative of all Americans, Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small found that slightly more than half the time, people confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them—like a spouse, family member, or dear friend. In some cases, the subjects actively avoided telling the people in their innermost circle because they feared unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama. It raises questions of why we choose the listeners we do.
“Some people are much better at listening than others, but it can be refined, it can be augmented, and can be turned into an art form,” said Coche, whose couples’ therapy groups are what you might call master classes in listening. Coche, whose default facial expression is one of wide-eyed solicitude, runs her group therapy sessions like a conductor, by turns eliciting more or less input from group members as if they were musicians in an orchestra. The conversational flow can falter and seem off-key in the initial sessions, but eventually things begin to fall into a more comfortable rhythm as trust builds and the couples become attuned to one another’s cues and missed cues, which inevitably leads to breakthroughs. “These people get to mean a tremendous amount to each other because they are listening to how each other feels,” said Coche. “If a partner isn’t listening, the others are, and they will learn.”
Group participants even start to call one another out for not listening to their spouses. “What happens is a new norm is established of what is good coupling,” Coche told me, gesturing around the room at the ghosts of struggling couples who seemed to still animate the space. “You see people break out of these bad habits they developed because that’s how they grew up and they never knew how to listen any better.”
An example is a man whom Coche described as a typical “mansplainer.” His conversational style was to lecture and correct, and as a result, he didn’t know how to be close to anyone. “To suddenly watch his face as he can finally listen and can paraphrase what his wife is saying, though perhaps somewhat awkwardly, it is like, ‘Oooh … now I see,’” said Coche. “For this man, it is a turning point, as it is for his partner. She will tear up. It’s a not knowing how to listen. Growing up, his family didn’t teach it or value it. It’s not purposeful on his part.”
But no matter how well we try to listen, or how close we feel to another person, it’s important to remember we can never really know another person’s mind. And prying is the quickest way to lose someone’s confidence. In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable nu
mber of such things stored away.”
It recalls a story told to me by Daniel Flores, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, which encompasses 4,226 square miles in the southernmost tip of the state. Like Coche, he sees a lot of struggling couples. They always make Flores think of his grandparents, who were married for sixty-five years. He remembers sitting at the dinner table as a child and hearing his grandmother say about his grandfather, “I will never understand that man.” That moment has stayed with him. “Here was my grandmother who loved this man, they’d been together through good times and bad, but still, there was this element of the inconceivable between them,” he said.
Bishop Flores believes that expecting complete understanding is the root of many troubled relationships. “We all long to express ourselves to another, but if we think there will be the perfect person who will be able to receive it all, we will be disappointed,” he said. “Not that we shouldn’t always try to communicate and to give each other the gift of listening, for that is love, even if we aren’t always able to understand.”
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Listening to people who are not close to us brings a different set of biases, but they, too, are rooted in false assumptions. Most notably, confirmation bias and expectancy bias, which are caused by our craving for order and consistency. To make sense of a large and complex world, we unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking. The categories can be broad stereotypes influenced by our culture or more individualistic based on experience. They can be helpful and accurate in some instances. But if we’re not careful, our rush to categorize and classify can diminish our understanding and distort reality. It’s the “Yeah, yeah, I got it” syndrome that makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are.
What happens is we meet someone who fits into one of our mental rubrics—maybe it has to do with gender, race, sexual preference, religion, profession, or appearance—and we immediately think we know them or at least certain aspects of them. Say I told you I’m a native Texan. Did that change how you think of me? Probably. Depending on your mental picture of a Texan, it might have raised or lowered me in your esteem. Same goes if you learn I’m covered with tattoos. It’s a reflexive mental tendency that gives you the illusion of understanding and, hence, lessens your curiosity and motivation to listen. Without realizing it, you start listening selectively, hearing only what fits your preconceived notions. Or you might even behave in ways that get me to confirm your expectations. Kidding about the tattoos, by the way.
Most people think other people are influenced by stereotypes but are oblivious to how often they, themselves, make knee-jerk assumptions. Research shows we all harbor prejudices because of our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves. None of us is “woke,” or fully awake, to the realities of people who are unlike us. At the same time, none of us can claim to share the same mind-set or values as people who we think are like us. When people say things such as, “Speaking as a white man,” or “Speaking as a woman of color,” that’s impossible. One can only speak for one’s self.
A white man, a woman of color, an evangelical, an atheist, a homeless person, a billionaire, a straight person, a gay person, a boomer, a millennial—each has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. Making assumptions of uniformity or solidarity based on age, gender, skin color, economic status, religious background, political party, or sexual preference reduces and diminishes us all. By listening, you might find comfort in shared values and similar experiences, but you’ll also find many points where you diverge, and it’s by acknowledging and accepting those differences that you learn and develop understanding. Our listening suffers from broadly applied and collective ideas of identity, which discourages discovery of what makes us and other people unique.
This relates to social signaling theory and social identity theory, which are two different but related theories dating back to at least the 1970s, which focus on how human beings indirectly communicate status and values. In more primitive times, social signaling might have been chest beating or hanging a large number of animal pelts outside the family cave. Social identification might have been affiliation with a certain tribe. Today, we gauge social status based on signals like the cars people drive, clothes they wear, schools they attended, or, as is increasingly the case, we judge people by their identification with an ideological faction such as alt-right, liberal, conservative, democratic socialist, evangelical, environmentalist, feminist, and so on.
There is an inverse relationship between signaling and listening. Say you see someone wearing a VEGANS MAKE BETTER LOVERS T-shirt or driving a truck with an NRA bumper sticker. You may feel that’s all you need to know about either person. It’s also fair to say that they may be so invested in those identities that it does tell you a lot. But it’s important to remember that what you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference. There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.
In the past, it was more likely insecure teenagers who would resort to in-your-face signaling to establish identity and group affiliation (think goths, preps, jocks, stoners, geeks, slackers, gangstas, and punks). But today, it’s a more widespread phenomenon. In our increasingly disconnected society, people have gotten notably more conspicuous and vocal about their affiliations—particularly their political and ideological affiliations—in an effort to quickly establish loyalties and rapport. These affiliations provide a sense of belonging and also the kind of guiding principles once provided by organized religions, which have correspondingly been losing adherents. Moreover, when people feel insecure or isolated, they tend to overdramatize and espouse more extreme views to get attention.
Of course, social media is custom-made for signaling. Showing that you follow certain individuals or organizations or retweeting or liking messages or images signals values and cool factor. Who needs to listen to people when you can just Google them? A Facebook page, Instagram feed, or LinkedIn profile, the thinking goes, tells you all you need to know. And yet, this is precisely why people may be reluctant to give their surnames upon meeting someone new, fearing that person will do the digital equivalent of going through their dresser drawers instead of getting to know them more organically. In dating situations, divulging your last name is now seen as a significant turning point in the relationship. The delay reflects a yearning to be known more deeply and individually first; to not be judged by posts, tweets, and other signals—which, after all, are not really accurate portrayals.
In T. S. Eliot’s 1915 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Listening is how you discover the person behind the “face” (or Facebook profile). It allows you to get beyond the superficial signaling and learn more about who the person really is—their simple pleasures and what keeps them up at night. By inquiring and listening, you show you are interested in the people you meet as well as demonstrate to those you care about that they retain your interest and concern as they inevitably evolve and change.
“Staying in touch” or “keeping up” with someone is nothing more than listening to what’s on that person’s mind—the frequency with which you check in determining the strength and longevity of the relationship. It’s all too easy to get complacent about how well you know those closest to you, just as it’s hard not to make assumptions about strangers based on stereotypes, particularly when reinforced by that person’s own overt social signaling. But listening keeps you from falling into those traps. Listening will overturn your expectations.
5
The Tone-Deaf Response
Why People Would Rather Talk to Their Dog
Say a friend tells you that he just lost his job, which he says is okay because he never really liked his boss and the commute has been a killer and just today it took him
an hour and a half to drive twenty miles to the office. He was always getting home late and eating dinner standing up in the kitchen because his wife eats with the kids and never waits for him. He chokes up when he says he doesn’t know how he’s going to tell his family he lost his job. And anyway, he says, clearing his throat, he has this big fishing vacation in Mexico planned and now he’ll probably have to cancel.
Of course, it depends on how well you know the guy and the circumstances, but, generally, responses like “I’m sorry you lost your job” or “You’ll find another job soon” come off as trite and dismissive. “You’re better off not having that crummy job” also misses the point. And saying, “You think that’s bad? When I got laid off…” makes it all about you. But a good listener, noticing when the guy’s voice caught and sensitive to what might be troubling him the most at that moment, might say something more along the lines of: “So now you have to break the news to your family? That’s rough. How do you think they are going to react?”
Research by Graham Bodie, a professor of integrated marketing communication at the University of Mississippi, shows that people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing but by giving descriptive and evaluative information. Contrary to the idea that effective listening is some sort of passive exercise, Bodie’s work reveals it requires interpretation and interplay. Your dog can “listen” to you. Siri or Alexa can “listen” to you. But ultimately, talking to your dog, Siri, or Alexa will prove unsatisfying because they won’t respond in a thoughtful, feeling way, which is the measure of a good listener.