"I'm showing that I understand"

The second commonest early reply is the matching story. They tell you about their flatmate and you tell them about Gareth. If they mention a bad back, you describe yours, and their holiday in Portugal reminds you of your own a few years ago.

The motive is a good one, as I said in chapter 2. A matching story says "I know what that's like", and sometimes it does exactly that. Two people swapping stories about dreadful bosses can be one of the pleasures of friendship. There's no reason to give it up.

The trouble lies in what the story does to the conversation when it comes early. The sociologist Charles Derber studied ordinary conversations in the 1970s and drew a distinction I find useful. I'm giving it from memory of his book and haven't checked the details. He noticed that a response to someone's remark can do one of two things. A support response keeps the attention on the speaker and their topic. "My back's been terrible." "Oh no, what's happened to it?" A shift response moves the attention to the responder. "My back's been terrible." "Mine too, I could hardly get out of bed on Tuesday." A shift response isn't rude. It's on topic and it's sympathetic. But the conversation has quietly changed owner. The first speaker's back is no longer what's being talked about.

One shift response does little harm, and conversation needs some of them, or nobody would ever get a turn. What matters is the pattern. If your first response to what people tell you is usually a shift, then people learn that bringing you a subject means handing it over. They start a story about their week and find themselves listening to one about yours.

Look again at the Sunday call. Hannah brought you her situation. Within a minute the subject was your shared house in 1994, and she was the audience for it. She could have fought to get the conversation back, but people rarely do. It feels petty, and by then the moment has passed. What people say in that position is "Yeah. Maybe," and then they change the subject.

The matching story has a second weakness, which is that the match is rarely as close as it seems. Your experience with Gareth resembled Hannah's in its outline. But you weren't in the middle of a break-up at the time, and Beth isn't Gareth. When you say "I know exactly how you feel", there's a fair chance you've mistaken her situation for yours. Your own story is vivid to you, and that makes it easy to assume hers runs the same way.

Timing fixes most of this. The same story, told later, works quite differently. Suppose you'd heard Hannah out and asked what else was a bit much. Suppose the conversation had gone where it needed to go. Twenty minutes later she might have been glad to hear about Gareth and the cheese, and it might have made her laugh. It would have come as a contribution to a conversation that was still hers. Told a minute in, it took the conversation over.

So my suggestion is a matter of order. Let your first response to anything someone tells you be a support response, about them and their subject. Your own story can wait, and it will usually be better received when it comes. Quite often you'll find that it no longer needs telling, because the conversation has gone somewhere more interesting.