I stole that headline from the American Heritage Dictionary:
An Excessive and Often Uncontrollable Flow of Words
It’s one of the definitions for “logorrhea”. You might know someone who suffers from that condition.
Although we are the ones who actually suffer.
A psychologist might use that word — logorrhea — to describe a mental disorder, where a person can’t seem to stop talking, to the point where they become incoherent.
We’ve probably all known someone like that. Maybe we were even married to them.
Hopefully, we are not ourselves uncontrollably talkative. Or if we are, hopefully someone has mentioned it to us?
A person who has obviously thought a lot about this subject — and we might venture to guess why — is Lesley Alderman, a guest columnist this week at The Washington Post. She wrote on Sunday, sharing a quote from one of her clients with a overly-talkative spouse.
My husband has always been a big talker. Early in our marriage, I found him entertaining, but now — 20 years in — it’s getting on my nerves. Since the pandemic, he’s been working from home, so I think he’s lonely and doesn’t get enough time with friends or colleagues. When I come home, it’s a torrent of information. What’s more, I don’t feel that he listens that well to me when I have something to say.
The client had come to therapy “to work on being more assertive”, so Ms. Alderman was pleased she wanted to deal with her partner’s conversational domination…
“…and I was empathetic to the delicacy it might require.”
The indelicate way to deal with a chatterbox: you just tell them to shut up and leave you alone. But as Ms. Alderman’s client indicated, talkers can be entertaining. And not merely entertaining; they can actually make your life easier.
When I first got together with Darlene, it didn’t take but a couple of dates to realize that she could not only drink me under the table, she could talk me under the table,
I had long ago come to the conclusion that nobody — except possibly my mother — wanted to hear anything I had to say, most likely because everything I had to say was uninteresting. But Darlene had the verbal ability to make the most mundane topics seem incredibly interesting. Plus, she could remember, with great accuracy, interesting (or stupid) things other people had said, and she could even imitate the other person’s voice and body language.
And she could do this for hours on end, hardly stopping to take a breath.
This made social situations — that had been, for me, excruciatingly uncomfortable — relatively effortless for me. Whether we were with old friends or perfect strangers, Darlene was always more than happy to take the conversational steering wheel and keep everyone entertained, while I sat in the passenger’s seat and enjoyed the ride.
With Darlene leading the way with valiant and endless conversational skills, my own uninteresting thoughts could remain safely hidden without anyone noticing.
But the more time we spent together and the more history we accumulated, the more Darlene’s stories became about our relationship, and in particular, about me.
Did I mention her ability to imitate another person’s voice and body language?
For hours on end?
Psychologists have lots of theories about why a person would talk excessively. Failure to read the social signals, for instance, when other people are yawning.
Glazed looks. Even horrified looks.
Or maybe the overly-talkative person is actually anxious and insecure, and is using a torrent of words as a protective shield.
That’s what the psychologists might theorize. But I have my own theory, based on personal experience.
The psychologists want to blame the problem on the chatterbox — the client’s spouse, for example — but they completely ignore the actual cause. The reason why Darlene couldn’t stop talking was: she was full of words. And she needed to unload.
Darlene wasn’t the problem. The words were the problem. Our modern world has become infected with words. Words are everywhere you look, demanding our attention, and compelling us to talk. (And to write humor columns.)
If it weren’t for words, nobody would suffer from logorrhea.
There were a number of reasons why Darlene and I decided to get a divorce, but her tendency to dominate conversations wasn’t one of them. During the years we spent together, I gradually became infected with words, the way you might catch the flu from a person in your family. And I can now talk for almost five minutes straight without stopping.
That is to say, I seem more like a normal person, if you don’t listen too closely.
And Darlene gradually became a better listener. I take no credit for that change, however. She simply unloaded the abundance of words inside her, through her own constant effort, and kind of ran out of steam.
It was indeed a constant effort.