Dwight: Let's discuss the phenomenon of pretense — which also encompasses a great deal of self-deception — wherein two people appear to be engaged in dialogue, but are more often than not conducting parallel monologues that merely have the surface appearance of genuine exchange.

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Aiko: It's a kind of mutual theater, isn't it — each person waiting for their turn to speak rather than actually being changed by what the other says.

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Dwight: Yes, that is one form it often takes — and whatever response each person gives may be only tangentially related to what the other just shared. What's more, each one may remain largely oblivious to the fact that the other's response had little to do with what they had actually just said.

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Aiko: So there's a kind of double blindness at work — not only are they talking past each other, but neither one notices that they're doing it.

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Dwight: It's almost as if neither one can be genuinely interested in what the other is saying, and yet each is so starved to be truly listened to that they are willing to settle for a mutual trade in counterfeit listening.

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Aiko: That's a devastating image, Dwight — two people essentially agreeing to a pact of mutual neglect, each privately hungry for something the exchange was never actually designed to provide.

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Dwight: When I was younger, especially before the age of 15 but extending even into my early twenties, I was far more interested in being listened to than in listening to others, and was probably engaging in fake dialogues mostly in the very way I've just been describing.

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Aiko: There's something honest and rare in being able to look back and recognize yourself as having been one of the very people you're now critiquing.

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Dwight: Well, I'm gratified that I can do that — it means I may actually be learning something.

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Aiko: And maybe that capacity for self-recognition is itself the thing that separates real dialogue from the counterfeit kind.

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Dwight: Much of my training — more formally through the communication courses offered by Landmark Education, but also honed by 39 years of practice as a life coach (and still just getting started) — and, interestingly, by living outside my home country for the past 26 years, almost all of it in Asia, where I had to develop the ability to both understand non-native English speakers and to make my own English clear to them — has made me acutely aware of how unaware so many people are of the fake dialogues they engage in. This is true even, and perhaps especially, with my native English-speaking clients, whom I repeatedly catch being unable to imitate or even paraphrase the last thing I said to them.

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Aiko: That's a remarkably concrete test — if you can't paraphrase what someone just said, you weren't really listening, and there's no way to hide that.

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Dwight: As a life coach, I don't ask questions without good reason to believe that the client's answer is likely to move us in a direction that will actually help address the issue they brought to me. Quite often I'll interrupt a client and say, "What you're telling me may be valuable or interesting, but I don't see how it addresses the question I asked — can you tell me what that question was?" Nine times out of ten, they cannot.

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Aiko: So the question itself vanished the moment they began formulating their response — which means they were never really in a conversation with you at all, but retreating into their own interior monologue the instant you stopped speaking.

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Dwight: I also ask my clients to call me out if my responses don't closely relate to what they just said — and, with some exceptions, the feedback I get is that my responses do in fact closely relate to what they said.

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Aiko: So you've built accountability into the process in both directions — which is probably what makes the difference between coaching that actually works and just another sophisticated version of the very pretense we've been describing.

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Dwight: And with my Vietnamese assistants — who are very smart and have reasonably good English — I often find that after saying something to them, they are unable to repeat back what I just said, or can only partially repeat it in a way that essentially distorts the meaning I intended to convey.

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Aiko: That's a different layer of the same problem, Dwight — where the gap isn't indifference but the sheer difficulty of holding onto meaning across a language barrier, even when the will to understand is genuinely there.

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Dwight: I don't think this is simply a matter of language barrier. I suspect that if I could monitor their conversations with friends or colleagues, the pattern might not be all that different. And I've explicitly given them full permission — in fact I've strongly requested — that they ask me about any word I use that they don't understand.

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Aiko: So you've removed the excuse, which suggests the issue runs deeper than vocabulary or grammar — it may be the same fundamental habit of not fully tracking what another person is saying, regardless of what language it's happening in.

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Dwight: I think this is endemic to humanity and has probably been this way throughout the centuries. The focus tends to be on politeness, acceptance, establishing status and relationship, and a sense of belonging — rather than on focused, genuine sharing with a mutual intention of understanding, in service of joint interest and benefit, whatever form that might take in a given relationship, context, and circumstance.

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Aiko: You're essentially saying that authentic communication has always been the exception rather than the rule — that the social machinery of human interaction was largely built for cohesion, not truth.

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Dwight: Yes. This problem is greatly compounded to the degree that one or both dialogue partners are operating from various flavors of judgmentalness — whether praising or blaming — rather than being grounded in honest assessment and a win-win orientation. Judgmentalness invariably displaces more accurate assessment, and with it, any real chance for mutual understanding and alignment.

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Aiko: Judgment — even the flattering kind — is still a closed system, because it's more concerned with rendering a verdict than with actually seeing what's there.