Hey everyone!
Long time no post… The Cinny client for Matrix no longer functions even after updating, so I have lost access to the chat.
Anyways, I have been thinking a lot lately about the amount of awkward silences I’ve run into with others. It feels like some people are significantly easier to hold a conversation with, as they themselves are invested just as I am in our topics and dialogue. However, it almost feels like the other person is attempting a strange power dynamic with purposeful silences, staring, or otherwise conversations going downhill.
I’m not trying to be overly dramatic or to blame others, I just want to be as pleasant as possible for both the other person and myself. After all, good conversation can be wonderful!
Hoping to start a discussion with this nebulous afterthought and maybe get some ideas going for conversation skills and building social intuition!
No problem! I’m glad I could help!
I’m also bad at the nonverbal stuff, so I can’t help you too much there.
Kinda, yes. Conversation is improvisational. If it seems like you are trying to steer it too hard in one direction, people can get annoyed. There is a natural flow to conversations which is very much in the moment. If you are thinking three steps ahead, that’s less brainpower that can go toward listening to what the other person is saying presently, which means you won’t be able to follow the conversational cues I outlined in my first couple comments.
That’s… not really the purpose of typical NT conversation. The purpose of conversation isn’t to make another person think, it’s to build a social rapport with them. In many ways, the actual content of the conversation is irrelevant.
Thinking happens automatically when the topic is something the brain wants to think about. You can’t force interest. That’s why so many of the tips I’ve given are about following the things the other person seems interested in talking about. The basic idea of a conversation is to gently probe different topics until you find one that both people want to talk about, and then talk about that.
The act of two people both conversing about something that makes their brains light up naturally creates a positive association between their conversation partner and the subject. This is how NTs become increasingly friendly and build social bonds.
Autists sort of do this too, but we tend to skip past the probing part and go straight to talking about the deepest aspects of our own favourite topics. If the other person shows an interest in conversing at that level, then we can make fast friends. But this often only works with other NDs.
NTs view this autistic approach as conversationally selfish because the back-and-forth of conversation is inherently fun for the NT brain. So the act of skipping straight to infodumping about a special interest feels to NTs like you don’t actually care about having a conversation with them, you just want to lecture about your interest. NTs want to feel like they are being spoken with, not spoken to.