girlfriend calls every night
 

Why does she want me to talk for hours on end!? I have to keep it interesting or she accuses me of being "boring over the phone" and such. I even get it over AIM. Any of you more experienced TFPers have any advice?

There's always the (somewhat lame) excuse that you are not good at phone conversations.

I am bad at them myself, but my wife has learned to live with it (she is the exact opposite).

Get used to it. If I didnt hate talking on the phone so much, I might have been able to save a 2 year relationship.

You could always tell her that you really don't like talking on the phone forever, and that she should just come over. Yea, I had her come over a lot, and damn, it was a hell of a lot more fun.

haha yeah, my girl likes to talk alot too, i dont mind it that much though... we usually have some pretty solid convo's, sometimes at 4:30 in the morning tho she complains im not talking and that im falling asleep after 7 hours of being on the phone... haha

I prefer to speak in person but i can breathe into a phone for an hour or so if it's that important, i never said that the conversation would be stimulating.
^
:)

I talk to my boyfriend on the phone everyday... and that always makes me very happy to hear his voice and to know what's goin on with him. We usually don't spend that long on the phone... just long enough to have a conversation about our day or maybe something that's been on our mind lately. I would much rather see him in person but the phone is the next best thing.

I'm guessing that maybe you are in a long distance relationship... in which case I can understand that your gf wants to keep the lines of communication open at all times. It's probably important that you talk to her on a daily basis. But maybe you can just explain to her that you like to talk to her... but you're just not into really long phone or AIM conversations... Tell her it's not that you're trying to be boring or that you don't care... but there just comes a point when you don't have anything else to say.

If you're not in a long distance relationship... why dont you just let her know that you're not really into the phone that much and you'd rather see her in person to talk.

i dont' know anyone in a relationship that doesn't talk on the phone everyday.. i think you might just have to get use to it.

It depends on whether or not you spent the day with said gf/bf. I would drop my gf off at home at the end of the night, and she would call me and wonder why I had nothing to talk about...as if something exciting happened on my 10 minute drive home :rolleyes:

I got good at talking to my girlfriend on the phone in my sleep. Apparently (I have no recollection of these conversations obviously) I'd say "uh huh", "yeah", etc at the right times for her to think I was listening. Only times I got caught were when I allegedly agreed to meet her for dinner, etc. She'd call wondering where I was, and I'd have absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

13 years of marriage, and I'm still not very good at phone conversations. This is a perpetual problem.

Welcome to the human race. The male part of it, that is.

Common problem. You get better at it, and she gets used to your deficiencies in this area.

If your GF was just like your male friends, you wouldn't be too happy now, would you? :-)

Mr Mephisto

If you are a talker don't lay huge expectations on or feel hurt if the other person isn't as talktative or doesn't wish to have long conversations.

Communicate with your girlfriend and explain to her the reasons you don't like to talk on the phone for long extensions of time, assure her it has nothing to do with her. Invite her over instead where talking won't feel like such a burden and silence can be golden.

Tell here you are more of a face to face type person & that the phone is boring to you.

i prefer face to face or msn/icq.. the phone is evil - why woman love it so much is beyond me.

back on topic: do you think that no matter what excuse you give them for not wanting to talk on the phone that they will STILL want phone conversations? they'll start giving you excuses like "what you don't want to talk to me??" "you don't love me?" and all that other BS. i think your just fighting a losing battle.

I think it's personally harder for me to carry on a conversation on the phone, mainly because I can't make any eye contact or judge what the other person is thinking with body language and such. Actually, it might cause an underlying anxiety with me, but I'm not so sure with your case. It's just harder to keep the conversation stimulating on the phone for some reason or seventeen.

:icare: Txlovely kisses Mr. Mephisto for his insightful post.
My SO and I call more but talk less. Not a bad deal - five to ten usually takes care of everything urgent or pending. Anything more means we actually have something about which to converse. Conversation is an art form - some of us got it (females), some of us don't (males)... ;)
Okay, overgeneralization, but you get my drift...

I really don't mind talking for hours if there's something to talk about, but we typically summarize our days in 10 minutes

I'd MUCH rather be with her, instead of having to talk on the phone. It's just like we don't even have to say anything in person, Just be there.. Over the phone It just doesn't feel right.

I don't mind having long phone conversations, as long as they're about something meaningful.

Things like 20 minutes of bitching about how someone might have possibly given you a dirty look don't count.

Talking on the phone with someone is almost like telepathy: your communication doesn't get filtered by body language. You have the option of having your entire world become the other person's voice.

Well, if you can pull that off: I've rarely succeeded.

My personal problem with talking on the phone is just an exageration of my usual problem when talking with people: I tend to think of 2 or 3 things at any one time, and I can get caught up in it.

When they are in front of me, I can think of how they are physically acting and what they are saying, which keeps my head somewhat busy... I can also think about the implications of what they are saying, walk along (short, ideally) tangents, etc. Which gives me my quota of things to think about.

When I'm talking on the phone, I can't think about their body language, so it becomes that much harder to concentrate on them.

If I don't watch it, I get caught up in a world of thought, rather than in what they are communicating.

<- ADD posterchild maybe? =p~

It does mean I am far better at out-of-sync communication than I am at live communication.

Anyone have any techniques that might help with this sort of problem?

Get used to it. Relationships require communication.

I really like it when people post questions then never post again.

I don't understand.

i'm a very busy individual and had to set some limits when this kind of stuff happened in my 1.5 year relationship. have to simply say that you enjoy talking with her but that you don't have hours every day to be talking on the phone. set up some boundaries like you'll only talk like that every other day, and slowly increase the time-between-calls

tell her to shut up, get in teh kitchen, and make you a pot pie...

/cartman

just kidding... uh... let her know how you feel about this?