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Sharing conversational space with other people might not strike you immediately as something that justice bears upon, but if you think through what it involves, you can see the connection between the virtue and how we carry out conversation. This becomes especially important within intimate personal relationships.
One key aspect of this that we discuss in this particular episode, which can be very helpful for couples, is not trying to pack too much into any one single conversation. There are several different good reasons to avoid that. One of those is that, if you want to talk together in a focused way, giving the attention at least one partner thinks a matter deserves to it (and to the partner), packing all sorts of other topics into the conversation will get in the way.
Often this tendency stems from a fear that one might not even acknowledge or realize, a concern that if what one wants to say or discuss doesn’t get addressed in this particular conversation, it won’t get talked about at all. If all we had were a single conversation with a person, then that apprehension would be reasonable. But it isn’t, and we discuss how we ourselves struggle against that mistaken assumption.
There are a number of other aspects to conducting a conversation in disciplined ways that we’ll be exploring later on. But we don’t need to try to bring those into the conversation at this point, since there will be plenty of other opportunities to explore them later. (See what we just did there?)
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