You know the type. They open with “how are you,” warmly, apparently sincerely, and somehow, inside about ten seconds, you’re hearing about their week, their back, their boss, their plans for the weekend. The question turns out to have been a starting pistol for their own update. You got asked, you began to answer, and the conversation pulled a smooth handbrake turn back to them before you’d finished your second sentence.
Oddest of all, once you start noticing it, is that they almost never know they’re doing it. There’s no cunning involved. They genuinely believe they asked after you and the two of you had a lovely catch-up. The redirection is completely invisible to them, and it stays invisible for a reason that took me an embarrassingly long time to work out. Nobody has ever been close enough to tell them.
It usually isn’t what it looks like
The lazy read is that these people are self-absorbed, vain, hopelessly in love with the sound of their own voice. A few are. But most of the chronic redirectors I’ve known aren’t villains at all, and the habit tends to come from somewhere more sympathetic than ego. Sometimes it’s nerves, a horror of silence that gets plugged with the only material they have instantly to hand, which is themselves. Sometimes it’s a clumsy attempt to relate, the “oh, you’re tired? I’m absolutely shattered too, honestly, let me tell you” manoeuvre, which they experience as warm fellow-feeling even as it drives off with your turn in the conversation.
They aren’t trying to seize the floor. In their own heads, they think they’re joining you on it. The gap between what they intend and what they actually do is enormous, and they have no way of seeing across it.
Why nobody ever tells them
The mechanism keeping the whole thing running is a cruel little loop. Honest feedback about a social habit like this only ever arrives through genuine closeness. A stranger won’t tell you. An acquaintance certainly won’t, they’ll just gradually arrange to see a little less of you. The only person who will actually say “you’ve got this way of turning every conversation back to yourself” is someone close enough to risk the friendship by saying it. A real friend. A partner. A brother or sister with nothing to lose.
But the redirecting is precisely the behaviour that stops people getting that close in the first place. It’s wearing to be on the receiving end of, so people keep a polite distance, pleasant and unbothered, and gradually drift. Which means the redirector never builds the sort of intimate relationship in which somebody would ever tell them. The habit, in other words, guarantees the absence of the one thing that might cure it. It is a lock that has swallowed its own key.
The man who couldn’t work out why he was lonely
I knew a man some years ago, an acquaintance more than a friend, who did this magnificently. You could have told him your house had burned down and inside fifteen seconds he’d have been telling you about a candle he once nearly left burning. I mentioned something genuinely heavy to him on one occasion, a real low patch I was in the middle of, and watched the conversation travel back to him so fast it was almost a feat of engineering.
What stayed with me wasn’t the habit itself. It was that he was, by his own account, baffled and wounded by how few close friends he had. He’d say it openly, that people never quite seemed to let him in, that he found friendship far harder than it looked on other people, and he hadn’t the faintest idea that the answer was on display every single time he opened his mouth. What caused the loneliness and what hid its cause were the very same behaviour. And nobody, me included, ever told him, because I wasn’t close enough to have earned the right, and getting that close was the very closeness his habit prevented.
Which made me wonder about my own version
What’s uncomfortable about spotting this in someone else is where it leads, if you’re honest. If he had a glaring social habit everyone could see and he couldn’t, and the only people who might have told him were held at arm’s length by the habit itself, then the obvious question turns and points at you. What’s mine? What do I do, reliably, that everyone around me has long since clocked and filed under “that’s just Daniel,” and that I have no access to whatsoever, because the people who could tell me either aren’t close enough or would rather avoid the awkwardness?
Everyone has one. A blind spot, by its very definition, is the thing you cannot see, and the social ones are the most savage of the lot, because they’re plainly visible to absolutely everyone except their owner. The redirector’s just happens to be unusually easy to watch from the outside.
The people close enough to tell you
This is why I’ve come to treasure the very small handful who have, across the years, told me hard and true things about myself. A friend who once said that I vanish the moment things get difficult. A partner who pointed out a defensive reflex I’d genuinely never noticed in myself. Each one stung like nothing else at the time. Looking back, they’re among the most valuable gifts anyone has handed me, precisely because they were things I could never have arrived at alone, things no acquaintance would have taken the risk of voicing.
Honest feedback about who you actually are is one of the rarest commodities going, and it’s available almost entirely through intimacy. The closer a person is to you, the more they can see and the more willing they are to say it out loud. Which carries a bleak corollary: the lonelier someone is, the less of that feedback they ever receive, and the freer their blind spots are to grow, unchallenged and unnamed, for years on end.
I think about the lonely redirector now and then, and I’ve stopped finding him irritating and started finding him faintly tragic, because his particular trap is so perfectly sealed. The behaviour pushes people away, the distance keeps the behaviour hidden, the hiddenness keeps it running, and round it goes, potentially for a whole life, a man forever asking everyone how they are and never once finding out, never grasping why every room he stands in feels so strangely far away. The cure was always going to have to come from someone close. He simply never let anyone get there. If you have even one or two people who will tell you the truth about yourself, the unflattering kind, the kind that stings on the way in, you are richer than you probably know. They’re the only ones who can ever hand you the parts of yourself you’d otherwise never get to meet.
