How many times have you heard that men don’t listen to problems, they just try to fix them? I think men are getting a bad rap. In my experience (as a fixer, listener, and sharer), everyone tries to come up with a solution. Or they add to your initial words by saying, “oh yeah, my aunt Hortense has that same problem, and she did…” , thus putting you in the position of listening to someone else’s story rather than answering the question about yourself.
Everybody means well. But I think we have lost the practice of really listening to each other. If you think back to recent conversations, I’ll bet you can remember occasions when you were just waiting for the speaker to stop so that you could speak. Sometimes we even jump in to finish the other person’s sentence, or begin our own perspective, before the other person has even finished. Not nice.
I found out that I can be a bad listener when my couples’ bible study was talking about communication in marriage. Joe said something, and the others asked me what I thought. I had to say, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening!”
“How are things going?” I’ve found that most people really only want to hear the short answer, so we respond with, “We’re just hanging on to God”. Many people don’t ask a followup question. But if you ask ME how I’m doing, won’t you stop and listen to my answer?
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 14, 2009 at 11:56 am
Jenny 867-5309
That’s so true. I think we have a tendency to get caught up in our own lives (probably wishing someone would listen to us) and not ask and truly want to know, “How are YOU doing?”.
September 14, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Josie
Oh, that is so annoying when you know someone is thinking of the next thing to say instead of listening to you. Of course I’m not perfect at that either. There are some times when some people are talking and I hear ‘blah, blah, blah’ instead of the real words they are saying. OK, OK, maybe I’m just as bad as everyone I’m blaming. Sorry, what was that you were saying?
September 15, 2009 at 11:25 am
Nothing profound
I’m sure you’ve heard Fran Lebowitz’s famous line: “The opposite of talking is not listening. It’s waiting.” Hopefully, this is just a joke, and not true of the human condition.
September 15, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Leian
Alot of times I ask “how are you doing?” more as a politeness than a real desire to hear a long update. People usually say, “I’m fine.” Guess that doesn’t really help us have a real conversation, does it? It’s more of a habit than wanting to know how someone is doing.
September 15, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Victoria Hart
A, I have a sort of sad, contemplative poem on my weblog that speaks to this male/female
“listening” void.
Nice site!