What it does to the story

Chapter 5 said people notice. This chapter is about what they do next, because the cost of the glance isn't mostly in the conversation it lands in. It's in the ones that follow.

People adjust. When your face drops halfway through, the person talking learns something about that story, which is that it's the kind that loses you, and they learn it faster than you'd think. So the next telling is shorter. The build-up gets cut. The point arrives early and flat, so it can be got out before the drop. And then the tellings get rarer, because a story told to a face that keeps leaving isn't worth the effort of starting.

Children go through this in a compressed form. The range Radesky's observers recorded ran from the child entertaining themselves to the child escalating, and I'd interpret the two ends as stages, not types. First the child tries harder, "watch this", "Dad", louder, closer. If that doesn't work often enough, the child stops trying. "Watch this" turns into doing the thing without asking. The quiet child at the table isn't always content.

With a partner, the adjustment looks like efficiency. They tell you what you need to know and keep the rest. The meeting story becomes "work was fine". The thing that happened on the bus doesn't get mentioned. And because the ordinary story is the audition for the meaningful one, which chapter 7 argued, the meaningful one doesn't get told either. It gets told to a friend, or a sibling, or nobody.

So the price of the glance is a slow thinning of what people bring you. You won't see it happen, because what's missing is a story that never started. You'll just notice, one year, that you're not sure what your partner's week was like, and that your child answers "fine", and you'll put it down to age or work or the stage you're at, and some of it will be that. The rest is the drop, compounded.