Adults who talk at people rather than with them often don’t know they’re doing it — and that gap between intention and impact is one quiet reason so many connections rarely deepen

I have a friend—I’ll call him Tom, because he isn’t called that—who, every time we have dinner, talks for about ninety percent of the meal.

I don’t think Tom would describe himself this way. If you asked Tom what kind of conversationalist he was, I’m fairly sure he’d say he was an engaged one. He’d tell you he loves a long dinner. He’d tell you he’s interested in people. He’d tell you, if you pushed him, that he values deep connection over small talk.

Tom is not lying when he says any of this. He genuinely believes it. The problem is that there’s a gap, a wide and unexamined gap, between the kind of conversationalist Tom thinks he is and the kind of conversationalist Tom actually is on a Tuesday night at a restaurant in Bangkok.

The Tom who actually shows up at the restaurant tells stories. Long ones. He tells them well, mostly. He’s funny. He has a deep reserve of material, drawn from a life that’s been more interesting than most. The stories arrive one after the other, with brief pauses between them in which I am supposed to either laugh, agree, or feed him a small prompt that lets him launch into the next one.

What he does not do, in my experience of dinner with him, is ask me a question. Not a real one. He’ll ask perfunctory ones—how are things, how’s work—but the answers are received as ten-second waiting rooms before he resumes broadcasting. If I attempt to actually answer the question, with anything that takes more than a sentence, I can watch his eyes drift, almost imperceptibly, toward the next thing he’s about to say.

I love Tom. I want to be clear about that. He’s a generous man, a loyal one, the kind of friend who’d help you move at 2 a.m.. But I have, after years of knowing him, accepted that our friendship is going to operate on a particular bandwidth, because the bandwidth he has available is a one-way one, and the gap between what he thinks he’s doing and what he’s actually doing is too wide for me, alone, to close.

The gap nobody tells you about

Here’s the thing that took me about a decade to fully understand: most adults who talk at people rather than with them have absolutely no idea they’re doing it.

I want to put that plainly because I used to assume otherwise. I used to assume that anyone who dominated a conversation knew they were dominating it. That it was, on some level, a choice. That the person was either selfish, or attention-seeking, or insecure in some specific way that produced the broadcasting.

I no longer think that’s right. I think most people who talk at others are operating in good faith inside a model of conversation that they’ve never had reason to examine. In their model, conversation is a pleasant exchange where each person takes turns telling stories. They tell theirs. The other person tells theirs. Everyone leaves having had a nice time.

The model isn’t crazy. It’s how a lot of conversation works. The problem is that, for the model to actually function, both people have to take turns. If one person tells stories for forty-five minutes and the other person mostly nods and feeds prompts, the model has quietly failed, but the talker often doesn’t notice, because their experience of the dinner—from the inside—is exactly the experience of a good conversation. They got to say what they wanted to say. The other person was, as far as they could tell, engaged. The dinner was great.

The other person, meanwhile, has had an entirely different evening. They’ve spent two hours operating as an audience. They’ve performed engagement. They’ve laughed in the right places. They are, by the time the bill arrives, depleted in a way the talker can’t see and wouldn’t believe if you told them.

Why the talker can’t tell

I want to think honestly about why this gap is so hard to close, because I don’t think the talkers are stupid. Some of the talkers I know are, in other domains, extremely sharp. They miss this one specifically.

Part of it, I think, is that conversation is one of the few activities in adult life that has no scoreboard. You can play tennis and know objectively whether you’ve won. You can give a presentation and see whether the audience laughed. You cannot, in any clean way, see whether a conversation went well from the other person’s perspective. The signals are subtle and easy to misread.

Most talkers read certain signals as engagement that aren’t, actually, engagement. The other person nodding. The other person making small affirmative noises. The other person laughing. The other person leaning in. All of these are, in fact, perfectly reproducible by a polite person who is performing engagement out of social habit while internally counting the minutes until they can go home. The talker can’t tell the difference, because from their side of the table, the polite person looks identical to a genuinely engaged one.

The only signal that would reliably tell the talker something is wrong is the absence of substantive contribution from the other person. But the talker often doesn’t notice this absence, because the talker is busy filling the silence with the next story. The very thing that’s producing the gap is also masking it.

The other piece is something a bit harder to say, but I think it’s true. Many people who talk at others are, on some level, lonely in a way they haven’t named. They have things they want to say. They don’t have, in their daily life, enough rooms in which to say them. So when they get a room—a dinner, a long drive, a captive audience—they unload. The unloading isn’t malicious. It’s the relief of having, finally, somewhere for all the words to go.

This is one of the quiet ironies of the dynamic. The behavior that’s keeping the friendship from deepening is often coming from a person who, deep down, would love the friendship to deepen. They just can’t see that they’re the obstacle.

What this costs the friendship

Here’s what I think gets missed in most conversations about this kind of conversational pattern.

The talker isn’t only failing to receive the other person. The talker is also failing to be received in any way that means anything.

This sounds counterintuitive. The talker is, after all, the one doing all the talking. They’ve put more of themselves into the room than the other person has. Surely they’re being received more, not less?

I don’t think so. Here’s what I’ve observed. When you talk at someone for two hours straight, what they end up knowing about you is the polished, story-formatted version of you. The anecdotes you’ve told before. The lines you’ve worked out. The version of your life that’s been refined into transmissible form. They don’t end up knowing the rougher, less rehearsed material—the stuff that only comes out when you’re being asked good questions and you’re searching, mid-sentence, for the right way to say something you haven’t said before.

That rougher material is most of what intimacy is made of. It’s the part of a conversation where the speaker is figuring out what they think while they’re saying it, and the listener is participating in that figuring out. It’s slow. It’s vulnerable. It can’t be done by someone in broadcast mode.

So Tom, at the end of our dinner, has presented me with a beautifully curated highlight reel of his life. He’s been entertaining and warm and on-brand. And I know him less well, in some real sense, than I know the friend I’ve had three slow walks with, who told me almost nothing about himself in any structured way but kept asking questions that pulled me into the kind of slow, mutual figuring-out that broadcast conversation can’t produce.

The talker is, paradoxically, often the least known person at the table. They’ve performed instead of revealed. The performance was good. The revealing didn’t happen, because the conditions for revealing—mutual pacing, real listening, space for hesitation—were never set up.

The hard part: telling them

I want to be honest about the limits of what can be done here, because I’ve thought about this a lot in the context of Tom and a few others.

Telling someone that they talk at people rather than with them is one of the more difficult social tasks I can think of. It’s right up there with telling someone they have bad breath. There’s almost no good way to do it. The person, by definition, can’t see what you’re describing. The very thing you’re trying to draw their attention to is invisible from inside their experience. Telling them about it is going to sound, to them, like an unfair attack on a perfectly nice dinner.

I’ve tried, twice in my life, to gently raise this with people I cared about. Once it went poorly. The person was hurt and defensive and the friendship cooled for about a year. Once it went, against all odds, well. The person, after an initial flush of embarrassment, said, “Oh god, do I do that?” and meant it. We talked, for the first time, in something close to a real conversation. The friendship deepened.

The difference between the two outcomes wasn’t anything about how I phrased it. It was something about the person. The first one was someone whose conversational style was, I think, defending against something deeper. The second was someone who genuinely wanted to know and had just never had the feedback. Most talkers, in my experience, are closer to the first category than the second. The pattern is load-bearing for them in some way they’re not aware of, and asking them to dismantle it produces panic, not adjustment.

So I’ve mostly stopped trying to tell people. I’ve made peace with the fact that with certain friends, I’m getting the broadcast version of the friendship, and that’s what’s available, and it’s not nothing, and I should put my real conversational energy elsewhere.

If you suspect you might be the talker

I want to end on this, because if anyone reading has a small suspicion that they might be the Tom in someone else’s life, I’d like to offer one thing.

The diagnostic isn’t whether you talk a lot. Some of the best conversationalists I know talk a lot. The diagnostic is whether, at the end of a long dinner, you could tell someone three substantive things about what’s going on in the other person’s life right now. Not their job title. Not their kid’s school. Three actual things. What they’re worried about. What they’re working on. What they’re thinking about lately.

If you can’t, the dinner was probably more one-sided than you experienced it being. That’s data. It’s not a verdict on you. It’s just an invitation to spend the next dinner doing slightly less of the talking and slightly more of the asking, and to mean the asking, and to wait for the answers without your eyes drifting toward the next story.

This is a small change. It produces, over time, a different kind of friendship.

The friendships I have with people who actually ask me things are the ones that have lasted. The ones where I’ve been the audience for two hours have, almost without exception, faded.

Tom and I still have dinner occasionally. He still talks for ninety percent of it. He still leaves thinking we had a great conversation.

I leave thinking I had a perfectly fine evening with someone I love but don’t, after all these years, fully know.

It’s not the worst friendship I have. It’s also not the deepest. The gap between the two is, I’ve come to believe, almost entirely accounted for by the difference between being talked at and being talked with.

The gap is small in any single conversation. Over a decade, it’s everything.