Chalk it up to generational differences? Or perhaps it’s situational; I will, for example, never aspire to have my mother’s marriage or the kind of relationship she has with her children.
Good conversation is like tennis: You volley your ideas on a subject back and forth, building your ideas on top of each other’s until you both have a deeper understanding of the subject and/or each other, and/or are enlightened in some way and/or are somewhat entertained.
Conversation is not, for instance, a conglomeration or random ideas spewed within a period of time. And it is definitely not whatever it is my mother describes, the converse of which is “like a classroom; the teacher talks, then it’s your turn to talk, then it’s my turn to talk.”
So you can imagine that I get frustrated with people who don’t have the skills to listen or carry a single train of thought at a time. And, seeing as I enjoy traveling alone, my default reaction is to simply not talk. I could stay silent (except the occasional question to locals) for days at a time. You would also be able to guess that my trip to Scandinavia with my mother has, so far, been nothing short of a epic test of patience (which I have unequivocally failed).
(She has since acknowledged and accepted—her word choice!—our contrasting definitions of conversation, which might be worse than her being ignorant of it in the first place.)
Words by Jenna 