Talking but not listening

[enidblyton33]

Interested in how others deal with similar people.
MIL just talks - about what she’s been doing (totally understandable), friends, friends of friends of friends, newspaper articles, books etc but in minute detail and doesn’t draw breath to allow for a normal conversation. When others do get a word in she will just turn it very quickly back to her. I’m just finding her increasingly draining.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older myself -and less patient- or my dc are no longer living at home so less people around to “absorb” her monologues.
Any strategies to make our time together more bearable - without just telling her to shut-up 😂

I quite enjoy people like this because I don't have to make effort to participate. I can just sit there and let them ramble and it's quite nice! I find it much harder being a with a quite person because then I have to make an effort to speak!! Maybe I'm just lazy :)

I know a few people who bloviate like this, and I try and jump in when the speaker is really getting into the weeds on something incredibly dull, irrelevant or something they've already talked about before.

Some people would take offence if you outright say, "I think we've heard enough about that", but I suppose there are more tactful ways.

My MIL has no inner monologue. It's very draining. Every thought that pops into her head is spoken and then repeated several times for every individual in the room.

No words of wisdom from me, just empathy.

An airpod in one ear and listen sneakily to a podcast that interests you at the same time as giving the occasional nod?

Does she live alone? My DM is a bit like this, but she lives alone, and I think she just needs to talk and talk while she has someone around to talk to! I usually let her go on without interuption, just the occasional "Mmmm"/"Really"/etc, and then it peters out and others get a look in eventually.

She has a lovely husband and a very active social life. Definitely not a lonely issue.

Great idea 😂 but we tend to see her for evening meals, bbqs etc and with DH’s so would be a bit odd on my part.

My mother, weirdly, only seems to do this to her daughters — the monologue, in her case on hip replacements, the weather, deaths and accidents. Her ideal event would be a car crash in bad weather in which everyone died and the only survivor was someone who’d just had a hip replacement.

With everyone else she says nothing apart from ‘Oh, really?’ Or ‘Did she?’ I think it’s because she’s a chronic people-pleaser, but we don’t count as ‘people’. On the phone she will listen to someone else monologue about their ailments for an hour in silence, apart from ‘Oh, yes?’

Cinema trip

MIL monologues rather than converses, it's boring and draining. I try and have some compassion as she is lonely and isolated, but it's difficult as she doesn't do anything to tackle her isolation.

My main tactic now is to limit the time I spend with her. I often imagine a little tune playing in my head while I sit nodding and mmhmming in response.