A conversation happens, words are exchanged, and afterward it turns out very little actually landed. This happens constantly, and the reason is simpler than it looks. Hearing attends to sound. Listening attends to meaning. Most conversations run almost entirely on the first.
Two distinctions make the difference visible. The first is between a word and its meaning. A word is only ever a pointer toward a reality, and the same word, happiness, love, respect, carries genuinely different meanings for different people. When a specific meaning gets offered for a familiar word, that meaning has to be deliberately re-attached to it, or the listener will quietly substitute their own definition and walk away convinced they already understood, when in fact something quite different was being said.
The second distinction is between hearing and listening themselves. Real listening only happens when there's actual interest, and at that point something specific occurs: an image of the meaning forms internally, the way a scene forms while a friend describes something that happened to them. Without that image forming, the words have been heard but not understood, and remembering a sentence later is easily mistaken for having understood it at the time.
This matters more than it sounds, because most disagreements between people trace back to exactly this gap. Two people can use the same word, respect, commitment, love, and be arguing about entirely different things without either one noticing, because neither checked what the other actually meant by the word being used.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple to state and genuinely hard to practise. Before agreeing or disagreeing with anything, check what was actually meant, not just what was said. A single clarifying question, asked with real curiosity instead of impatience, resolves more conflict than most people would expect.