Convorientation
My friend Skrappy asks
So, with all this talk of D/s, Top/bottom, Cuddle Top/cuddle bottom etc… I wonder if there could be an equivelent for general conversation having… I can’t stand to carry a conversation and i love it when people either just go on about themselves or something they’re interested in, or take it uponm themselves ask the questions that spark a conversation. I’m pretty sure there are people who prefer to do it the other way round, aren’t there?
I suspect there’s something really valuable to discover here, and I’d like someone to discover it, but I probably don’t have any particularly useful insights myself. Some things which do seem relevant:
I get mildly nervous about hanging out with people one-on-one, in case I can’t think of anything to say. Even people I count as my best friends. It’s easier with them, because we’ve hung out enough that logically I’m pretty sure I’m capable of holding a conversation with them.
There are probably multiple axes here. Likes/dislikes talking, likes/dislikes listening, likes/dislikes asking questions would be vague ones. Then if a +talk/-listen/-ask is chatting to a -talk/+listen/+ask, they’ll have a good conversation even if someone on the outside thinks the +talk was rudely dominating it (and the +talk might also think that, and the -talk might worry they were boring).
But I’m not actually comfortable placing myself upon these axes. Upon reading the original, my instinctive reaction was that I was a bottom. That probably caches out as -talk/+listen/+ask. -ask seems more accurate for me. But when I feel like I’ve had a really good conversation, I think those are often ones where someone has managed to draw me out and make me talk. And the conversations where I just listen… some of those are really interesting, some are boring.
There’s probably a difference between disliking a conversation role because you just dislike it, and disliking a conversation role because you just aren’t very good at it yet/think you aren’t very good/think your partner doesn’t enjoy you doing it. I can think of things in the latter category for me, e.g. I think I would enjoy asking questions more
if I thought I was good at asking the kinds of questions that help
people to talk about things they want to talk about. I can’t think of a
conversation role which I’m pretty sure I just inherently dislike, but
that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, or that other people don’t have them.
There are probably also axes related to personal-ness of conversation. There are people I’ve known for years and we’ve never shared anything personal, and there are people who get me sharing personal things the first time we meet. I don’t think that’s just about conversational style, but it probably is at least somewhat? And then there’s interesting versus mundane, which is obviously a matter of opinion. But LW type conversations are often great to bottom in, and conversations about TV are not.
So like, maybe I’m somewhat toppish about personal things, provided I have a partner who I feel comfortable with; and somewhat bottomish about interesting things; and I just don’t particularly care for mundane conversations?
Note: I’m not confident that everything I’ve said about myself is true. Introspection is hard.
