Tell someone when you need listening before the conversation becomes an unwanted repair session.

People who care about you tend to reach for solutions, partly because it is the only tool they are certain they hold. So an account of a hard day becomes a plan you did not want, and then a second frustration sitting on the first. Neither person is doing anything wrong. The kind of help was simply never specified.

Say which one you want before you begin, in a plain sentence. Telling someone you need them to hear this rather than fix it takes five seconds and saves the whole conversation from a detour.