The Rules of Conversation

It is not the most sexy or hot button topic, but knowing how to converse is surely one of the most important skills we can learn and develop.

I linked to Dilbert's post on it a couple of days ago, without very much commentary, because I thought that Scott Adams had hit upon a very important insight, namely that conversation has rules. Link here.

To improve your skill at conversation, to say nothing of your human relationships, you would do well to recognize the fact that conversation is a game that is played according to rules. If you know the rules and master them you will vastly improve your facility with the game.

Life is not a cabaret. It is not an entertaining spectacle where you alternate between being on and off stage, between performing and spectating.

Life is a conversation. If you have poor conversational skills this fact will negatively affect all of your human relationships, be they collegial, familial, romantic, or amicable.

Conversation is not just any old game. It is a type of social ritual that is best understood as a gift-giving exchange.

At root, conversation is a formal ritual. Meaning that it has strict rules and that it can best accomplish its goals when those rules are followed.

Conversation has a simple purpose: forging and maintaining human social connections. That is not the same as using our verbal performance skills to entertain our friends, to show off our prowess, to express our deepest feelings, to provide sycophantic compliments, or to give ourselves an ego boost or massage.

All of these maintain a barrier, a separation between two people who are conversing. They disconnect. They are all one way streets, with either too much give and not enough take or too much take and not enough give.

Finding a balance, achieving conversational temperance is difficult. It requires work. It takes time to master. It will not initially feel very natural. But it is well worth the effort.

Mutual intemperate outbursts do not establish a connection between people. If I scream at you and you scream at me, we are not engaging in a reciprocal exchange. We are fighting. And conversation done well is not a fight.

A good conversation begins with a greeting. At least, in the best cases it does. Many years ago I lived for several years in France. There I discovered, among other things, that every time you ran into a friend or acquaintance, they would invariably greet you with the formulaic: Bonjour, Stuart. Greeting plus name.

I did not have to burn through too many gray cells to understand that I needed to reciprocate: Bonjour, Odile.

As a rule it is good to greet people by calling them by their names. It connects us, it brings the meeting into the world of friends, not foes.

In America we also begin conversations with one or another formal expressions. We say: Hello; How are you?; What's up? We do not always use proper names, but I would recommend that people try doing it.

Some of these greetings, like Hello or Good Day, are mere formal gestures. Others, like: How are you?, are questions. As most of us know, someone who asks how you are is not really asking how you are. If he wanted to know how you were he would express concern about your appearance: Are you alright?

So the right answer to, How are you?, is always part of the formal ritual, almost as though you were responding to a password with another password. You can say: Fine, Well, Good, Great or any variation thereupon. Then you should return the question and ask: How have you been?

If you have not seen the person in a long time you should add something to the effect that it is good to see him.

Clearly, these formal conversation openers are not the place to be creative, clever, or literal. The person is not asking you how you are. He does not really want to know if your gout has been acting up. He is not offering an opportunity for you to express your feelings about Darfur or to unburden yourself about your sister's drug problem. As I said, he is offering a password and is expecting to hear the proper password in reply.

Most people do not want to hear your bad news. If you open a conversation with a complaint, you will be subtly distancing yourself from the other person. Reaching out to touch someone-- to coin a phrase-- is not the same thing as pouring your heart out.

Not everyone respects the formal, ritual aspect of conversation. The new breed of pickup artists seems to believe that the only good way to open a conversation with a stranger, usually a strange woman, is to say something that is so clever, so witty, so perfectly informal that she will immediately start thinking about how quickly she can get out of her clothes.

If that is the goal, surely it works some of the time. But it is more about seduction than about conversation, and if your goal is to meet a strange woman in a bar, there are other ways to make that initial connection.

You can, for example, walk up, smile, introduce yourself, and start a conversation... but about something other than yourself.

Given that you are not on intimate terms with this strange woman, why not begin by showing some respect. The alternative, if you really want to seduce her, is to offer something  that is intimate and revealing. Given the rule of reciprocity, when she hears something intimate and revealing she will instinctively want to reciprocate with something equally intimate and revealing.

She will either take the bait or dismiss you as a lout.

Conversations should begin with an effort to find common ground. They should not open with personal information or disclosures.

From there, if you want to keep to the formality, you move on to something in recent history that impacts on the fact that you are late.

Tell how your bus broke down or how you got lost in the park, but never make it sound like a complaint. Make it sound like an adventure.

Try to avoid commenting about the other person's appearance, unless it seems like he or she went to a special effort, and unless you can say that the person looks great. It is not very important whether the statement is a true expression of your aesthetic judgment.

Keep in mind that you are trying to establish a connection, and good connections are established slowly, incrementally.

Most people prefer to socialize with those who bring glad tidings. If you open a conversation with an account of your problems you are not engaging in a reciprocal exchange. You are asking for free advice.

It is best not to share bad news unless it is absolutely necessary for the person to know it. And that means that the two of you already have a substantive connection.

If you open a conversation by sharing some bad news, the other person is always going to start asking himself why he needs to know this.

That is why it is always a good idea to be careful about confessing your indiscretions to your spouse. Your spouse does not want to know, does not want to think about it, and will assume, once you confess, that you are doing it for a reason that goes well beyond the need to soothe your guilty conscience.

As a general rule, you should not make your friends into receptacles for your negative emotions. You do best to keep your anger, envy, and despair to yourself. The less you share them the less powerful they will become.

Similarly, bragging is bad form. People who must share good news most often mask it with humility.

You are not there to get something off your chest, to vent. A venting exercise is all about you, and would be the same no matter whom you were engaging.

The same applies to telling jokes. We all like to hear jokes, but someone who is telling a joke is performing for an audience. And when he is on stage telling the joke, a wall goes up between him and his audience.

They might like him for being so entertaining, but they will not be connecting with him.

As I said, revelations of personal information, information about one's life and the feelings that would accompany it, are to be doled out incrementally. You want to ensure that each revelation produces an equal and opposite revelation.

If you disclose too much, you will see it immediately when your interlocutor fails to reciprocate. At that point, you should shift the conversation onto more neutral ground. Never respond to a failure to reciprocate by exposing more of yourself.

Given that we are aiming for a temperate exchange of thoughts, facts, and feelings, we always want to maintain a civil tone.

If your words are like a gift, they should also be covered by a reasonably nice wrapper. 

Some people like to rationalize their failures at temperance by saying that they feel so strongly about something, and feel so strongly that they are right about something, that they just cannot control themselves.

By now, everyone is familiar with the maniacal rant that New York Congressman Anthony delivered on the House floor a couple of days ago. From now on we can call him: Mad Anthony.

Rest assured that that is exactly the wrong way to engage a conversation. It is a good way to make yourself look like a madman or a fool.

You should not judge how well a conversation is going by how much you have been able to communicate. You should not even judge it according to how intently you have been listening.

If a conversation is an equitable exchange of information, the exchange must be kept in balance. If the exchange is reasonably balanced, you are connecting. If it becomes too one sided, then one or the other person is showing off, complaining, taxing the patience of the other person... and refusing to connect.

When you are at lunch or on a date, try to see if your conversations are fully reciprocal, or if one person is hogging the floor, monopolizing the conversation, or offer too much information too soon.

This would correspond to a situation where one person gives another a gift that is so expensive and extravagant that the other person cannot possibly reciprocate.

Such gifts mean that the giver is trying to place the recipient in his debt.

A good listener does not just sit their in a semi-hypnotic trance, offering an occasional nod of agreement. A good listener is an active participant in the conversation, offering something that is equal and opposite to what has been offered.

A good conversation is not about spending yourself. It is not about consuming the words of the other person. It is about giving and receiving, in roughly equal measure.