**TL:DR talk about yourself by saying just a little bit in a way that’s relevant to the topic at hand, and give the other person the implicit choice to ask further or not.**
If you want to learn how to have great conversation, whether you’re the worst kind of conversationalist possible or not, how to start a relationship, how to get physically intimate, how to learn how to easily find replies for any conversation, and how to express yourself in a way that people will enjoy – you’ll want to read the full post.
*Disclaimer: this thread is written assuming you want to be liked by people. This thread isn’t about whether someone deserves your time, you’ll have to find a different guide for that. This is about how to have good conversation with people. Remember not all conversations should be “good”, like during debate or when talking to disrespectful people.*
HOW TO TALK ABOUT YOURSELF: PROLOGUE
We first have to see why it’s a problem in the first place…
The primary interpersonal sin is exploiting someone else: the act of taking something from them (energy, time, money, attention, body, etc) without their genuine consent.
The simple calculation is what they’re consenting to minus what you’re taking from them. You don’t want to leave them negative.
On a big scale, it’s like your partner cheating on you: you consented to a relationship only on the condition of mutual exclusivity, and they’ve exploited your trust to hide the fact that your relationship has reached a condition you didn’t consent to (e.g. open relationship).
On a smaller scale, it’s behavior beyond social convention. if you ask a coworker you barely know for $5 and no explanation, it’s way less than asking for a relationship… But it’s also completely unexpected. So they might feel pressured to do it because it’s a bizarre enough request to feel like a test or social blackmail of some kind. They might give you $5, but they’ll also feel like you’ve just exploited their discomfort and politeness for money.
On a minor scale, this happens ALL THE TIME wirh people with poor self identity. They (usually, unknowingly) exploit the social norms of politeness to extort you for more time / energy / emotion than you had wanted to give.
Exploitation tends to leave people in a kind of blackmail situation where their only options are bad: they either comply with someone else’s demands, or they risk social/physical/financial/emotional harm.
In other words, we can see the basic interpersonal sin (exploiting or blackmailing people) play out in tons of conversations every day, just on very minor scales. 90% of the time it’s accidental, and you’re not a bad person for doing this, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are made uncomfortable by these conversations.
Let’s illustrate some real-world examples of conversational exploitation:
• Your boss vents at you about their home life, getting way too TMI and taking up too much of your time. Whether they know it or not, they’re exploiting your power dynamic to make your options “listen” or “have the person responsible for your living wage dislike you”.
• Your friend keeps asking you for more money. They’re exploiting your desire for connection and friendship for cash.
• Your coworker does nothing but complain ALL DAY LONG. They’re (unknowingly) exploiting your inevitable consistent contact to siphon validation, pity and other emotional reactions from you. The exploitation comes from the fact that you can’t tell them to shut up without making the relationship dynamic even worse indefinitely. Usually, this setup happens when the complainer periodically does one nice thing for you, tipping the scales just slightly away from “well I’d rather have them hate me forever than hear them complain one more day”.
• The friend who constantly talks about themselves. They’re exploiting your politeness, and often the dynamic between the two of you, to get a series of “wow” and “that’s cool” and “uh huh” from you until they feel like they’re done saying their monologue. These people tend to want a mix of attention and validation because they just want to express something. The problem with this technically only comes when you don’t consent to this: otherwise two friends mutually infodumping to each other is actually an awesome dynamic if you’re neurodivergent.
• The “friend” in a friend group who keeps goading or bugging you, maybe insulting you. They’re exploiting your desire to stay in the friend group (and your fear that they can easily eject you from it) to pleasure themselves using comparison.
• The one friend who constantly makes self-deprecating comments. They’re exploiting your self-identity as a good person to self-soothe off your validation. You’re in a blackmail situation where you’re either making them feel better, or potentially contributing to them doing harmful sad behaviours if you don’t find the perfect words to placate them. I wish this wasn’t the case because it’s not really fair, and self-deprecating people are often traumatized already: but constantly self-deprecating people are unfortunately the least likely to keep friends, even less than aggressive people, because the situational blackmail goes so deep (“one wrong word and you’ll literally make them hurt”) that it’s almost impossible to have agency during a conversation or realistically give/withhold consent to any given topic.
IN SUMMARY, this is when it’s bad to talk about yourself:
• When the other person has no agency with regards to how to reply.
• When it feels like you’re exploiting your dynamic to just start fishing for validation or attention for your personal things.
• When it feels like you don’t *care* if they want to hear your words or not.
• When it feels like you’re breaking the conversational contract (“you listen to me, I listen to you”) by ignoring their previous sentence and basically going “just listen to what I want have to say, without me listening back at you, or else you’ll be seen as rude”.
**WE’RE FINALLY HERE: HOW TO TALK ABOUT YOURSELF IN A TASTEFUL MANNER!**
**#1: Establish consent to talk about yourself.**
• The trick is you can’t just say “can I talk about myself” unless you have friends who are comfortable with saying “no” to that.
• Instead, mention a small detail about yourself that you want to share, embedded somewhere in your reply.
• It’s up to the other person to give consent for you to continue, by asking to hear more. Eg “What’s Overwatch 2 like?”
• *THIS MEANS SOMETIMES YOU DON’T GET CONSENT. SORRY!*
• Sometimes people don’t want to hear about the topic you teased. Dang, that sucks. If you think it’s worth getting out there and they’ll genuinely appreciate it by the end, then jump into it anyway.
• If someone DOES ask for more details, it’s still not time to waterfall. Instead, give the next-most-interesting thing about this topic that you think they’d find interesting to hear, and then give them a chance to consent to more of this topic or a pivot onto more common ground.
• e.g. if they say “Oh sounds like a cool game. I play puzzle games more than FPS usually”, that means you’re done talking about your game and now you’re talking about their preferences, unless you have more to share that’s relevant (“I like Overwatch even though I don’t like FPSs because of the tank role…”)
• This is also how you date people and how you get intimate. Move one step closer so it’s OBVIOUS what you’d like to do (e.g. have your hand close enough to hold) but not OVERWHELMING enough of a step that they feel forced into only one answer. Give them a chance to back up gracefully. If they lean in and go slightly further, reciprocate and go slightly further yourself. If they pause, or only reciprocate exactly (e.g. they don’t push further than you did) that’s your limit for the relationship at that time.
• Anyway! This is consent: Give a little hint or mention, and give them the option to unravel further on their own agency while keeping things casual enough that they can feasibly ignore or redirect it without it getting awkward. If they ask further about your videogame, or the idea of a date, or about your rough morning before work, that’s your window to say a bit more. Piece by piece.
• Note that it’s perfectly normal and chill to complain about stuff or share vulnerability or honestly have any conversation topic you want ONCE YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED CONSENT IN THIS WAY. If you’ve been reading this thinking “so what, you’re saying I can literally never express a sad thought without it being exploitative?” my answer is “what, of course you can, just ease into it and establish consent to drift towards that topic from something more neutral”.
• And if a strawman replies “what if I want to talk about something that’s uncomfortable and nobody really wants to hear it” my response is “well do it if you want! this whole post is the method to being liked, not how you should live your life. Remember there are more factors that go into your choices than just optimizing likeability, so if you want to rant or whatever do it. It’s just not enjoyable for others to hear, but you’re not obligated to be enjoyable every minute you spend with someone else”.
**#2: Establish that you’re listening.**
• Conversation is a mutual exchange where people listen to each other.
• This means *remembering* stuff that was being said.
• This means having your reply – either now or later – acknowledge what they’re expressing.
• I don’t mean this in a literal way, but you want to metaphorically try to keep a 70%+ rate of expressing that you comprehend at least one detail of each sentence they say.
• *Imagine trying to be a good listener to someone who rants for minutes about a topic you don’t care about, without your choice, and without letting you get a word in edgewise! It’s very hard to have a good conversation with someone who jumps onto talking about themselves without your consent.*
• Anyway, assuming you’re talking to someone speaking in regular length sentences, it’s a good idea to understand what they’re saying. The literal facts are useful, but if possible you also want to understand the undercurrent conversation.
• “I love overwatch” = they play videogames, they enjoy fictional media. Perhaps they like colorful games more than gritty ones? Perhaps they think you’re into videogames too, by mentioning it? You’ll have to make sure your facts and conjecture are kept separate, but it’s good to start building up a picture of them based on their words.
• There will be fuzzy knowledge gaps in their words when you listen. “I went skiing in Vancouver” = they’ve been to Vancouver, they went skiing, they engaged in a sport. (Did they do it with friends or family? By themselves? Are they okay with the cold? Do they do other sports? Are they not fearful of injury? Do they ski often? If not, do they try new things often?)
• You’ll first of all notice that by trying to piece together a holistic understanding of this person that a lot of questions come up, gaps of info that will paint a different picture of their personality based on how they answer. Are they closer to family or friends? You might get a hint by asking who they ski’d (skiied?) with.
• This is also how you make conversation and find ways to reply: find gaps in your picture of their self-identity, and ask for details that help paint their backstory, preferences, values, fears, opinions, affiliations and aspirations.
• This is ALSO how you talk about yourself: when it comes to hinting or mentioning something you want to express, you’ll want to introduce it along the common ground of what you know about them.
• At first you might need to lean on cultural common ground (asking a Canadian about thoughts on Tim Hortons quality going down the drain even more, except maybe those loaded cilantro lime bowls, or talking to anyone about the weather).
• Once you know some more details about them though, it becomes easier to bring up the thing of yourself that you want to express by making it relevant to the conversation topic.
• This has the dual bonus of 1) proving you ARE listening and caring about them, and not just waiting for the right time to start exploiting them to rant about yourself. 2) finding a way to frame your self expression into something they actually might be interested in hearing.
• For example, different people might want to hear about overwatch in different ways:
• “I’ve been into a videogame that requires a lot of team coordination. I can’t imagine trying to shout across the ice instead of in headphones. In hockey do you have to speak in code or shorthand? or how does that work??”
• “That’s really cool! I’ve been enjoying Overwatch recently as a way to hang out with friends in the winter. Do you find that you look forward more to outdoor or indoor winter stuff?”
• “Lol I’ve been staying up late playing overwatch recently so I’ve also been missing sleep. Do you do okay with less sleep or does it have a big impact for you?”
WOW okay so this was a lot of info. Let’s summarize, focusing on the actionable things to do and leaving the explanations in the main post.
• Talk about yourself in tiny pieces at a time, letting them consent to hearing more by asking for details. This means sometimes they don’t consent, and them’s the breaks. Move on.
• Contextualize what you say within a detail of what the other person is already talking about.
• Provide a way for the other person to have more than one option for how to reply. Eg limit “terminal statements” where they can only reply in a way they’re slightly uncomfortable with, lest they be rude.
• (If the situation is obvious where they consent, terminal statements are chill like ‘i love you’ ‘i love you too’.
Good luck out there!! Lmk if you have questions!