I once read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. There’s this famous rule: ask questions, listen carefully, let people talk about themselves, and they will immediately like you. It sounds reasonable. And, surprisingly, it works.

But it works one way only.

When I started using this rule in real life, I noticed something strange. I could talk with someone for an hour and say almost nothing about myself. One question, then another, and the other person would start a long monologue. Sometimes the only thing anyone asked me was what time it was. The rest of the conversation was just me being the wall they talked to.

For some people, this rule works almost too well. They tell me very personal stories after five minutes of knowing me. I’m not sure if this is a talent or a flaw, but by asking the right questions I can open almost anyone. But then a question appeared in my mind: does this mean I am actually making friends?

At some point you want the conversation to go both ways. You want someone to ask: “and what about you?” or “what do you think?”. Nothing complicated. Just normal human exchange. And this is where something odd happens.

When you really want your question to come back to you, that’s the moment when questions stop working.

I start answering, make a one-second pause – that’s how I speak – and in that one second the other person jumps back into their monologue. As if my pause was a signal: “okay, now it’s my turn again”. That’s when I understood something: people are not really looking for a dialogue. They are looking for an audience.

It’s not meanness. It’s not egoism in a moral sense. It’s more like a natural automatic behaviour: a tendency to move the conversation back to one’s own stories, opinions, and memories. Exceptions exist, of course. But like most exceptions, they only prove the rule.

Questions open people. But they don’t open relationships.

And that’s the little detail Carnegie never wrote in the footnotes.