That's men for you: I am a very poor conversationalist. Put me in a group of people talking animatedly and within five minutes my mind will be elsewhere.
I may occasionally look as though I know what's going on but there is no way I would pass a Larry Gogan Just-a-Minute Quiz on the discussion.
This used to concern me. I felt under an obligation to contribute to the general chatter. Now I don't seem to mind. I suppose it's called accepting yourself.
This disengagement from conversation, of course, is something that many women would claim to recognise in their men. When it comes to conversation within a personal relationship, women are the great talkers.
Strong silent types, or even weak silent types, are more likely to be found among the men. This seems to have an enormous amount to do with the differing attitudes of the two genders towards the role of conversation.
The big difference between men and women as regards conversation in a close, personal relationship seems to be this: women see conversation even about quite trivial matters as an expression of the relationship itself.
Men see conversation as something functional, something that's meant to convey some sort of information that needs to be conveyed for some sort of purpose.
When you see a man and woman sitting together in the pub with nothing to say to each other, you assume, of course, that they are married. That may well be so. But they may also be victims of these differing attitudes to conversation.
From the man's point of view there may be nothing that need be said at the moment.
From the woman's point of view there may be no point because she's not going to get a response anyhow.
Counsellors sometimes find themselves coaching men to talk to their partners about their feelings, their attitudes and their day, regardless of whether they think this achieves any useful purpose or not.
As far as their partners are concerned, their relationship exists partly in conversation and the content of the conversation is not necessarily important.
I don't mean by this to trivialise women's attitude to conversation. All the deepest conversations of my life have been with women. But because women can see the conversation as an expression of the relationship in itself they can see value in a conversation which men might dismiss as pointless.
John Gray's book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is quite good on all this and if you're a man and you haven't read it you should. Every woman on the planet has a copy of it in her library, regardless of whether her library consists of three books or 3,000 books. So you may as well find out what it is that they are being told about you. Moreover, it's pretty good stuff.
Deborah Tannen's 1990 bestseller You Just Don't Understand - Women and Men in Conversation is also very good on the subject. She points out that men tend to dominate conversations at work meetings, conferences, committees and other "public" settings, even when women are in a majority. But when it comes to building a rapport with an intimate partner, the talking is left to the women.
So if we guys want to brush up our relationships with the women in our lives, we need to speak up; even if we don't really have anything desperately important to say. Remember the fact that you're talking just might be more important than what you are talking about.
For relationship-building it is more important to talk about what Ms Tannen calls "the fleeting thoughts and feelings" you experience throughout the day than about the intricacies of the new world order. Women know just as much about the intricacies of the new world order as you or I but they'd also like to know a little bit more about the intricacies of you and me.
So get talking. Give it a go and see what happens. I'll give it a go, too.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accreditied by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy