Well I hate talking on the phone, pretty much everything about it is irritating and uncomfortable. I use it only for an exchange of information.


1) It almost always rings when I'm busy doing something else, because, well, I have a life. I'm not sitting around all day staring at my phone hoping it'll ring and end my boredom.


2) I have to hold the stupid thing to my ear. The longer I have to do this, the more uncomfortable it is. Speakerphone helps, but is more difficult to understand because of added speaker distortion.


3) Voice quality isn't so great, particularly with cell phones. Also, everybody seems to talk at a different volume (or their phone transmits at a different volume), and I'm either getting a headache because it's too loud or I'm struggling to hear what they're saying.


4) It's a disembodied voice I'm talking to. I much prefer to be able to look somebody in the eye, see their body language, etc. On the phone I'm just there, staring off into space, which is either distracting, or utterly dull.


5) Because people can't pick up on each other's non-verbal clues, phone calls inevitably last longer than anybody really wants, but they're both struggling to think of something new to talk about when both people probably want to hang up already. As such, conversations, even if they started out as a relevant exchange of information or even just an emotional message of "I was thinking of you and I like you", drag on into increasing levels of irrelevant small talk about nothing.


So yeah, I prefer to talk with somebody in person. You get the extra, what, 80% or something of the conversation that's non-verbal, you can much more easily focus on who you're talking to, and if you're talking to somebody in person, chances are you specifically set aside time to do that. I tolerate long phone conversations only with people that are far away, usually just relatives in other states, etc. Even then, I usually end it abruptly as soon as it seems the useful parts of a conversation have passed. If a girlfriend wants to talk to me, great, I want to talk to her too, but let's use the phone call to pick a time to meet up and do that so we can look each other in the eye, or use a method of communication that allows for multitasking and isn't so intrusive in people's busy lives (email, IMs). I'd definitely prefer the face-to-face thing though.


I don't have a wife, I have fine communication skills, and I'm quite intelligent. I just prefer to avoid the frustrations involved with both the technical aspects of telephony and the intrusion, not to mention the lack of actual human contact involved.