Learning to Shut Up and Listen

My wife is a proud introvert. I am a formerly shameless extrovert. Our relationship cratered in the early days on the fault line of this chasm between conversational approaches.

Our default mode from decades of habituation was this: I overtalk and fail to listen, miss cues and over-value my ideas, talk about big things we were going to do together with little to no input from her on her dreams, and then feel satisfied and expectant of her affirmations of all the great stuff I’d said. When she sneaks in to the conversation, I steal her topics and make them my own, or take any bid she would make for me to listen and convert it into a chance to mansplain, mansolve, and manappropriate the discussion.

The more I talk, the more she actively listens, asking great questions and capturing everything I say with her steel trap memory. She knows all the people I reference from years of hyper-engaged listening and she effortlessly connects today’s stories to last month’s. Not a stone goes unturned on her part. Requests for clarification and queries for further exploration rain down. She never steals the show, turns the conversation back towards her, or tries to explain away anything. She listens with the care a schoolteacher gives a child.

Full spotlight.

Then later, the reckoning.

As she reviews the progression of our discussion, she starts to realize that she had not had the space to bring up any of the thoughts, stories, or suggestions she had stored up over the day. She feels bowled over, overlooked, unseen, and unheard. Her ideas didn’t get to see the light. She then would share her frustration with me. It confused me and the defensiveness it invited opened caverns of distance. Usually I’d just throw myself in the canyon with this comment:

If you wanted to talk, why didn’t you just say something?

Then, the vortex. The over-talker blaming the under-talker, and the under-talker blaming the over-talker, all the way to oblivion. After years of trying to “win” at the blame game, and with some outside help, I made a strategic decision which changed our lives.

I decided to listen. Every chance I got.

When an extrovert learns to shut up, he still talks a lot – so no amount of course correction is going to be over correction. And an introvert speaking up and speaking out still means comments are carefully considered before they are voiced, with an empathic and observant consideration of how the other participant is feeling.

And you know what I got for all that effort?

Bursting rays of conversational sunlight; beautiful thunderstorms of previously concealed moods; great arcs of grievance and joy and anger and love, pointed questions that drew on patterns noticed by a review of previous conversations; tiny comments artfully placed; lots of complaining about people (mostly her mom); mini songs and accompanying dance parties with above average karaoke potential that will sadly never see the light of day because she tragically, mistakenly, and vociferously dislikes karaoke; explosions of ideas from everywhere; flashlights shining on dark corners, everything illuminated; stimulation from books, podcasts, music, the arts, culture everywhere and of every kind; tender provocations and unending curiosities; surprisingly interesting debriefs on yoga instructor quality as measured by instructor level of expertise minus instructor level of condescension; blinding insights on the world from a woman’s perspective. Most importantly, a human being that doesn’t resemble someone who could ever be silenced.

The more I listened, the more I earned her trust; the more I earned her trust, the more she would share. With the help of our therapist in facilitating new patterns of conversation, a virtuous cycle unfurled where I hope I became her equal as a listener, and she increasingly my equal as a speaker. And it is in no small part thanks to that, I believe, that I earned the right to become her husband.

So why do I tell you this?

A few weeks ago I went to the Network for Executive Women (NEW) conference. The head of the women’s caucus at Walmart, Karen Stuckey, and the former board chair of NEW, had read an essay I had written called Swimming in Privilege, and invited me to join. It was an essay which Manuela had encouraged me to write about all the times I had gotten it wrong on issues of gender.

The conference was in San Diego. For three days I listened. For three days I heard women talk about what it’s like to be a woman at work. For three days I immersed myself in the perspectives of a gender still fighting for equality, for an equal proportion of seats at the table, for the chance to contribute its talents to the workforce. For three days I felt the unfairness of unequal compensation. For three days I heard about what it’s like to be interrupted, undervalued, and under promoted. For three days I saw the disadvantages, the biases, and the depths of male privilege that stack the deck in both huge and tiny ways. For three days I absorbed as much as I could about the nuances of being a white woman versus a woman of color, a straight woman versus an LGBTQ woman, or a woman of means versus a woman fighting every day for economic survival. For three days I admired the spirit of women undaunted, unperturbed, and uncompromising in their ascendancy as equals.

Coming out of the conference I feel an enormous sense of possibility. I am incredibly humbled and excited to share that I was nominated and approved to join the board of NEW.

So now what?

There is so much to do.

I am grateful to have a vehicle and an outlet to express my solidarity and fight for an equal future. There is a difference between being aware of a problem, and being immersed in it. There is a difference between opinions and hypotheses, and getting grounded in the data and the research about both the problems and the solutions. There is a difference between being fleetingly upset about something from a distance, and making it a core part of your day-to-day work. There is a difference between dawning awareness and taking action.

I will be honest: I do not know what the work entails yet, and I’m not even sure how much I can do. What I do know is that whatever is possible begins with the listening, and I am eternally grateful to Manuela, force of nature that she is, for teaching me as a man that when you actually close your mouth and listen to women, whole new worlds opens up, bigger and brighter than the ones familiar.