On Interrupting Me
Men apologise for interrupting me far more elaborately than the offence requires, which is itself worth examining, but not first. First I want to say what the interruption actually is, because it is almost never rudeness and treating it as rudeness misses everything useful about it.
An interruption means he stopped listening at some point before he spoke. Not at the moment he spoke. Earlier. Somewhere in the middle of what I was saying he formed a response, and once the response existed it began demanding to be delivered, and the remainder of my sentence became an obstacle between him and the delivery. By the time he interrupted he had not been present for some seconds, and the interruption is simply the visible end of an absence that started well before it.
That is what I am interested in. Not the discourtesy, which is minor, but the moment he left. Because it is usually the same moment. Men are remarkably consistent about where in a sentence they stop attending, and the location is diagnostic. Some leave the instant they hear something that could be a criticism, and everything after that lands in an empty room. Some leave when I begin to be specific, because specificity is where a general and comfortable conversation becomes one with obligations in it.
What almost none of them do is leave out of boredom. That is the reassuring part and I say it plainly. The departure is not indifference, it is the opposite. He left because something arrived that mattered too much to be received passively, and he reached for a response as a way of managing it. The interruption is a sign of engagement badly handled, not of engagement absent.
Which is why the elaborate apology is misplaced. He is apologising for a breach of manners, and I am not thinking about manners at all. I am thinking about the fact that he vanished at the word criticism and did not come back, and that this has now happened three times, and that the three times were all in the same place. The apology addresses the surface and leaves the thing entirely untouched.
What I would rather he did is notice it. Not correct it immediately, which produces a man so anxious about interrupting that he stops responding at all and simply waits, tense, for a gap. That is worse, and it is the usual overcorrection. I would rather he became curious about the location. Where do I go. What was being said at the moment I stopped hearing it. That question is worth several evenings and it answers itself quite quickly once it is being asked.
I will occasionally stop mid sentence and wait. Men find this unbearable and assume it is a reprimand. It is not. It is simply that there is no purpose in continuing to speak to someone who has left, and the waiting is the shortest way to make the departure visible to him. He usually returns within about two seconds, slightly startled, and I carry on from where I was, and neither of us needs to discuss it.
The interruption is not the problem. It is the receipt for a problem that occurred earlier, and he is the only one who can go and look at where it was issued.