Dear Eric: Our next-door neighbor is a longtime university professor who is well known in his field. We have been neighbors for many years, and we all get along well. He lives alone.
An irritating habit of his is to stop by and launch into long-winded stories about some mundane event in his present or past life or to pontificate about a current event. He fancies himself as a raconteur and because he is used to having a lecture hall of students listening to him (supposedly), he thinks we also should be entertained and enthralled by his musings. We aren’t.
It is particularly annoying because he never asks about anything going on in our lives. Another mutual friend is equally frustrated with him.
Do you have any suggestions to deal with this? It doesn’t happen frequently enough to demand a strong response that might damage our friendship.
—No more long wind
Dear No more long wind: It may be effective to catch him in the moment and redirect. “Hold that thought; we were in the middle of a different conversation, if you’d like to join us.” Something like that. Or you can ask him a question that moves him off of the pontification. Or you can simply say, “would you give me the CliffsNotes?” A good raconteur knows a good story is not much without a good audience. And a good audience is different from “literally anybody who is within earshot.”
Because you don’t want to make a big deal out of it, you don’t need to address the content of his mini-speeches, if you don’t want to. But it’s a good idea to gently but clearly adjust the expectation. If he finds that every time he shows up, he’s being redirected or invited into another kind of conversation, he may start to understand his audience in a different way. He may understand that he doesn’t need to do this performance at all. Indeed, you’re not actually his audience—you’re his friends.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
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