| There is an inequality in conversations that I have noticed for a while. I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed this either.
When two people have a conversation, there are [most often] two roles that people automatically assume: 'the teller' and 'the listener'.
THE TELLER
The teller is the person who talks about themselves. They tell stories about their life, talk about their own problems, talk about what they like, what they don't like, their own family, etcetera. They basically talk about themselves in general.
THE LISTENER
The listener is the person who listens to the teller. The listener nods along, agrees, makes some statements, but basically listens to the teller talk about themselves.
Essentially, these roles switch very frequently. The teller will tell about themselves, and then the listener will relate to it by assuming role of the teller and telling about themselves in a way that may be superficially relevent to what the previous teller was saying. Here is an example.
A (Teller role): I went to a great restaurant the other day and had the most amaznig fish I have ever had in my life.
[At this point the listener is playing the role of listener and listening to what person A has to say. They eagerly await assuming the role of teller.]
B (Teller role): That's interesting, because when I was out on the east coast they also had really good fish, I was staying in this small fishing village in Maine.
Something like this.
People like to talk about themselves. This is not a new idea - it has been mentioned before in pickup and the community - talk about the other person! People LOVE to talk about themselves. This is because no one knows anything better than themselves. No one can relate to anything better than what they themselves have experienced. So, talking about something foreign / someone else that they cannot directly or intimately relate to may be boring, uncomfortable, irrelevent, or hard to connect to for them.
So, talk about the other person, right? Well, that same rule probably goes for you too. I mean, you may like to talk about other people, but you can't exactly directly relate if it isn't something that has affected you. It is extremely difficult to have a conversation that doesn't ultimately come back to these two roles of 'teller' and 'listener' - or, 'self' and 'self'.
There must be a middle ground. We need to be able to talk about other people and relate to them through something intermediate, or themselves. There is also this inequality - if you only talk about the other person, they love the conversation because they talk about themselves, which most people enjoy. But you may not enjoy it so much - it is nice to be able to relate to the conversation by including your own experience and expressing that experience.
This is where a genuine interest in people becomes a very handy and useful tool to have. If you enjoy talking about other people's lives and problems and ideas and whatever they are talking about themselves, you will find conversations a lot easier, and people will probably enjoy talking to you more.
There is also the 'mystery' factor to it. It makes sense that you shouldn't reveal too much about yourself in one conversation, or too readily. Don't exactly hide information about yourself, but don't voluntarily give up your life story. Leave some saturation time, give yourself a dark side.
I hope this made sense. I was basically just writing by my train of thought, trying to get this down. There isn't exactly a full solution to anything in here, but it is something I have noticed.
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