Ending a too-long phone call is not always comfortable
Dear Miss Manners:
I have a relative who lives alone and who calls me every week to chat. This would be fine, except the calls are always over an hour long, and the person only talks about their own interests and doesn’t really let me get a word in.
I find an hour is a long time to just sit and listen, but any polite attempts I make to end the call are ignored. I’ve tried, “I should get to bed, as I have work in the morning,” “I think I’ll head out for a walk while it’s still light out,” and “I have dinner reservations at 7:30,” among others. But the relative either ignores me or launches into “one last story” that goes on for 30 minutes.
I don’t think they mean any harm — I think they may just have difficulty understanding social cues — and I don’t know how to tell them how I feel without hurting their feelings. I’ve started to avoid answering their calls because I dread how long they go on. What should I do?
Gentle Reader:
Your relative has, perhaps unintentionally, stumbled on a technique well known to telemarketers: If they keep talking, a polite person will be reluctant to interrupt or to hang up. This is the right impulse, as one rudeness cannot justify another. But that does not mean you must be a helpless victim.
No one can actually speak without taking a breath — and when they do, dive in with a short, complete sentence such as, “Thank you, goodbye” and hang up before the person can restart. This requires careful timing and is not comfortable, as it means not waiting for the normal full stop from the other person or leaving a breath before hanging up.
With your well-meaning relative, you will still have to preface it with multiple gentler attempts to end the conversation. For telemarketers, it was enough, in the ancient days of landlines, that they not hear the receiver impacting the telephone base.
Dear Miss Manners:
Last July, one of my adult daughters died. I placed the obituary in the Sunday paper, cross-referenced to my maiden name so my relatives would be sure to notice it.
With the pandemic, we did not have an open funeral. But not one of my 29 second cousins on my father’s side even sent a sympathy card, and only four of my 37 first cousins on my mother’s side did so.
Now one of them has died, and I’m having mixed feelings about how to respond. I did send a sympathy card. But attend the funeral Mass? Why should I? They can’t even send a sympathy card. Why should I go out of my way for any of them?
Gentle Reader:
The lack of family acknowledgment when your daughter died is heartbreaking. But the reason for attending a funeral is to show respect for the dead. This remains a central tenet of etiquette, irrespective of what you believe happens after death.
Nonbelievers can agree that there is comfort for the living in bearing witness, even if the subject can no longer appreciate your effort. Miss Manners therefore recommends you attend — not for the sake of your aunt or uncle, but for the sake of your cousin.
Dear Miss Manners:
My wife offered a plain but earnest apology for a small domestic transgression — it involved overstaying her turn in the television room — and I was unable to summon a gracious, honest response.
“Apology accepted” and “You are forgiven” both seem to violate the modern norm of “no problem” or “forget about it,” which don’t recognize that the error really did cause a problem. What’s a handy way of accepting an apology without either minimizing the error or piling on to the perpetrator?
Gentle Reader:
It would seem to Miss Manners that one could accept without qualification a spouse’s earnest apology for a small domestic transgression — in the interest of marital harmony, if not of strict justice.
But if you cannot bring yourself to do so, surely you can thank your wife for her apology, and assure her that the incident is forgotten. And if not, you will have more than etiquette trouble.