Small Talk
Photograph by Charles Deluvio
I’m too good for small talk, I think. Too intelligent, too sensitive, too deep, to bother with pointless pleasantries and dead-end discussions. Yes, it sucks that it’s too hot, yes, it’s a surprise that it’s still raining in October, yes, I too am waiting for the winter in Bangalore, trust me. No, I haven’t watched Sex Education, no, I haven’t been to that restaurant with great cocktails, no, I don’t care that RCB failed to win yet another IPL championship.
Why can’t we just get to the good stuff! Let’s talk about our traumas, our grand philosophies, our insights from therapy, our proudest achievements, our wildest experiences, our relationships, our sex lives, our dirtiest fantasies, and how it felt to murder an ant for the first time (it was the most powerful I have ever felt)
For me, the strengthening of a relationship, the indication of its depth, lies in how often you and I get to the “good stuff”. If we continually engage in surface level snacking, the denial of my entrée becomes all the more frustrating. And I will lose interest in you. Lose interest. In a human being. Each of who has stories spilling out of their eyes, endlessly complicated and intriguing, even the idiot, especially the idiot. How does that happen so easily to me? Why do I fail to do justice to you?
The “deep conversation” allows you and me to enter into the realm of core human experience. Your traumas, your philosophies, your insights, your relationships, your fantasies, however different from mine, will all still allude to experiences that are central to being human. Pain, sorrow, anger, horror, loneliness, joy, ecstasy, wonder, laughter, meaning. Or lack thereof.
I don’t have to try too hard for connection because it is already there. I connect with what you have experienced, because I recognize some of it within myself. But I could further say that I am not really connecting with you, but rather with a part of my self which I see within you. At the very extreme, this might mean that it doesn’t really matter who I am talking to. As long as your experience speaks to some of my own, I will stay engaged. I will stay engaged, because I am engaged with a part of me. And not you, per se. Not you, whoever you are, Amar, Afreen, Antoinette.
Through small talk however, I see the opportunity to engage with the other facet of the human experience- its multitude. Yes, we have core experiences as human beings. But, each of our lives also consist of experiences that are different and varied in all their minute details. Through small talk, I can engage with those differences. Those details which make you, you. Not the experiences which make you a human being, but the experiences which make you Amar, Afreen, or Antoinette.
A few words about the upcoming winter, might lead to a conversation about the upcoming trip that you have planned, alluding to the IPL could lead to a conversation about your experience watching a live game at the stadium for the first time, and probing further into that restaurant with great cocktails may lead to you recounting something ridiculous that happened to you that night.
There may be nothing which is inherently and instantly thought provoking or emotionally heightened about these experiences. And that is precisely why I have no recourse to a part of myself in these moments, which can help me feel connected to you. I necessarily need to be interested in a part of you that is yours and yours only. And that in itself will need to be sufficient to sustain my engagement with you.
The desire to only and constantly be engaged in “deep conversation” then might speak to a form of co-dependency within me. A desire to merge with you through our shared experiences, so that connectedness is assured. So that you and I become one, and our humanity stands recognized. In doing so, I am spared the discomfort of recognizing your separateness as a human being, of recognizing that I will always be irreconcilable with you, your ego, your body.
That I, for good or for worse, will have to contend that you cannot be dissolved in me. In order for me to do justice to you, I will need to be curious about all that makes you different from me. In doing so I open myself up to more of you. And I find so much more to like about you, to be intrigued and fascinated by. But also to dislike about you, and be disgusted and disappointed by. And that’s okay. Connection isn’t supposed to be easy.
