My Husband Thought I Was Interrupting
And I thought I was engaging in “cooperative overlapping”
During graduate school, I lived with a woman who was getting her Master’s degree in linguistics. Once, for a research paper, she asked my best friend and me to have a half-hour conversation that she could film and analyze.
We did. And forever after, my friend and I had to listen to her complain about how boring our conversation was (about British TV shows and the band Toad the Wet Sprocket, two of our favorite topics). But her biggest complaint was about how hard our talk was to transcribe.
Neither of us ever finished a sentence. My friend would start, and I would talk over her (or vice versa) for the entire half hour. That made all the words difficult to hear.
If asked afterward, neither of us would have thought we didn’t speak in complete sentences, or that we ever interrupted or talked over one another. That was just how we talked.
Evidently, some things that work with your best friend do not work with your husband.
My interrupting got on my husband’s nerves
My husband’s demeanor can be described as “pretty calm dude.”
