When Bad Listeners Happen to Good Women

A woman I was in love with would tell me stories quickly, without stopping. In the first few months of our relationship we often went to dinner at the same French restaurant in the West Village, where it was quiet and the waiters left us alone. One night I was talking about my parents and how they'd managed to hide the acrimonious parts of their divorce. She listened for a long time and then she told me a story about her father, about how furious he'd been after her mother left him for another man. She was 9, and she and her little brother had been left to live with their father in rural Connecticut. Her father forced her to go duck hunting with him at dawn on Sunday mornings. While they hunted, he told her long, graphic stories about what an evil person her mother was.

I believed that I was listening. I may have grimaced, because the experience sounded bad, and I know I wondered about how what had happened to her so long ago might affect our own future. But I wasn't doing anything more than drinking wine and picking at the scallops I'd gotten as an appetizer. She was speaking rapidly, eating salad while she talked. I found myself saying, Slow down, finish what you're eating, what's the matter? I can't listen if you talk in such a rush. She went quiet then. I felt bad, and I was aware that somehow I'd appeared hostile. Later that night we rode the subway, headed back to my apartment in Brooklyn.

"Why were you in such a rush before, when you were telling that story?" I asked.

She looked down, as if she was weighing what she needed to say. "It's because I can't help thinking that if I don't get the story out fast, you'll lose interest—or leave."

What she said felt like a punch, because I saw how she'd feel that way. I'd listened badly, and presumed, incorrectly, that simply by being present I was doing a good enough job of hearing her, of taking in what she was saying. I knew then that though I was a better listener than I'd been in the past, I still had a lot of work to do. I don't believe that being a good listener comes naturally—I think it's a skill, and I look forward to getting better at it.

My listening low point came years ago, when I was in my early twenties. It was a Saturday, 11 A.M. on a beautiful fall day in Manhattan, and I was walking along Fifth Avenue with my girlfriend, toward the Metropolitan Museum. Neither of us lived in New York then, though we wanted to, and the enchanting quality of our visit to Manhattan encouraged us to reveal things about ourselves that we'd previously kept hidden.

We walked by a man in jogging clothes who smiled at my girlfriend as if he knew her, and though she said she didn't recognize him, she felt unsettled and admitted that he reminded her of another man. Then she told me a very painful story about something that happened to her in college. She was drinking with a group of friends, and she ended up going to bed with a man she'd only thought of as a friend prior to that night, someone she played soccer with, whom she had never considered sexually. They kissed, and then, before taking any measured steps toward intimacy, they were naked and in the middle of sudden, undiscussed sex. And it was only then that she realized that was not what she wanted. While she talked, she held my arm and stroked it and even leaned up against me. I had my hands stuffed down into the pockets of my jeans.

I found myself walking faster, looking up toward where I thought the museum was. "We'd better hurry," I said. "Or there are going to be lines."

"What?" she said. And I said it again, about the lines and how we ought to start walking more quickly. She went cold. I realized my mistake, and I quickly said some awkward, lukewarm things about the difficulties of being drunk in college, about how hard it is to be young and excited and at the same time understand anything about your intentions. But by then it was too late.