Communication Blockers, Part II
When you fail to actually register someone's question or comment, you shut the door on talking just as surely as if you'd said no. Eventually the other person stops bothering. They decide it isn't worth the effort to be heard. Most of us have been on the receiving end of that kind of silence at least once.
Sometimes the reaction goes well past silence. A question or remark can be met with a flare of temper, occasionally with violence, and once that happens the listener never gets to say what they meant to say. Consider the father of eight who would erupt at the dinner table, slam his fists down, and banish whoever had spoken from his meal and the room. Seven of his children never finished high school; they cleared out of the house as fast as they could find any job at all, and in those years that came young, before you had to wait until sixteen to drive and work. A man like that only needed the smallest interruption to set off that kind of outburst.
Dodging a conversation is a way of dodging responsibility too. Stay ignorant of something and you have a ready defense: how can you be blamed if it goes wrong, or expected to fix it, when nobody ever told you?
But think about the moment a person genuinely needs the other's help or advice, a problem they simply cannot work out alone. The block costs them.
There's another version that surfaces later rather than in the moment. One person completely forgets the conversation ever happened. The other walks away certain they not only discussed the problem but settled it. Then the day arrives when the matter has to be acted on, and the whole exchange has evaporated from one side, leaving the person who raised it with more trouble and frustration than before.
No excuses here. Talking, and listening, is one of the pieces a good relationship is built from.