Dear Derek, after your podcast interviews, (link) I’ve been thinking of what you said:
You liked conversing with a lady Olympian who said, “I do not hang out.” You very much preferred one on one conversations that were not “hanging out.”. You would be so disappointed when a fellow would surprise you, after you thought you had scheduled a nice get-together, by bringing along his friends too, friends who valued “relaxing” over productive intimacy. I can relate.
I’ve noticed, to my secret disappointment, a strange phenomenon whenever a few of us would be in a group conversation: If we were interrupted, even briefly, then no one would pick up the old conversation thread. Maybe to them “it didn’t matter” because they were merely “hanging out.”
The problem with small social groups? For me? I have to politely go by the “slowest ship in the convoy” regarding vocabulary, intimacy, frivolity and curiosity. ’Tis a pity.
As for group socializing: After my evening Toastmasters Club meetings various people would retire to the tavern. One morning over coffee a young lady from the club confided to me how she despaired of talking too much while in the tavern. Despaired. I advised her that at the bar table I secretly count heads, do division, and then only talk my fair share of the time. A few days later she looked so happy to tell me, “Your advice really worked!”
As for one on one socializing, Derek, I might advise on the “time factor” because, from your podcast, you like emotional intimacy and you restrict yourself to a “one hour” conversation. However, intimacy doesn’t flourish if a person feels disrespected at only having one hour. Moreover, intimacy likes safety. As a professor explained on our first day of class, “If someone agrees to smoke a cigarette with you, then you know you safely have seven minutes. If they agree to a coffee, then you can safely relax with the knowledge of having 15 minutes.”
As for an iron ceiling of one hour, this might perhaps, possibly, for some, not allow them to feel safe. (Especially if my brain is whir-whirring from a false feeling of too much to say in too little time) A hypothetical example: I would avoid any topics, or stepping stones, that might possibly lead to me to start crying about dear Dad at ten minutes to deadline. Better to avoid anything related to dads. It’s like how in a dictatorship—or a dysfunctional family—some topics won’t even remotely be approached lest they lead further to touchier topics.
Speaking of “my brain whirring,” I once “released” an old friendship with “Sarah.” During my internal debriefing I realized something: I had never relaxed enough to tell Sarah any stories during any of our conversations, although I do for other people—I had even told a story to Sarah’s wife over the telephone once. (About me meeting bikers, and one asking me, at the end, “Were you scared?”) As it happens, Sarah and I have since reconnected, while for my part, for her, I now have grey overcast everyday expectations…
… Saturday. After we had attended a morning Toastmasters seminar. Early afternoon. There I am: In a strange tavern with two not-so-young ladies. One has a fiancé whom I have never met. The topic is cool! So Intimate and interesting! The fiancé enters the bar, walks up, and —like something out of a feminist caricature— he immediately speaks several flat sentences… Oblivious, agenda-setting, and centre of attention… Hijacking the conversation, and so our topic is gone like smoke. I forget all the words but I won’t forget how I felt. And so I was not surprised, when I met the lady just a few years later, to hear she was divorced.
To prevent hijacks, if one is late to bars, seminars or in everyday life, it helps to remember the old Chinese proverb: “When you go outdoors, look at the weather; when you go indoors, look at the faces.”
I can tell you of a space-time location where folks truly prefer to converse, as opposed to “hanging out”: Namely, the social crowd of young 1930’s Paris intellectual students including (“but not limited to,” my lawyer hastens to add) Simone De Beauvoir and her boy friend Jean Paul Sartre. (Both of them are still in print) Sometimes the whole gang flocked in a group to a large cafe, a gathering which, to the cafe manager, was unremarkable.
Simone tells in her memoir of something that amazed the manager: If a pair of of students (Of course the pairs would mix and match from day to day) had come in and were talking, and then another pair came in, the second pair would find their own table… as would the next pair too.
Easily explained: With all due respect to relaxing, they relished the effort, the learning and the reward of earnest one on one conversations. The students viewed conversation as getting somewhere.
As I found in Derek Siver’s notes on the book Geography of Genius: “We’re not talking about conversation as a form of entertainment. We’re talking about conversation as the piling up of premises leading to a conclusion. We’re talking about conversation that takes an issue forward, conversation as a way of getting somewhere.”
Derek, I believe you and I are not the only ones to seek Paris friends. I for one am still seeking.
…
Sean Crawford comments are a form of conversing,
Northwest of the city of Medicine Hat
October 2020
Footnote: One on one is a basketball term, and is the name of a movie about a ball player recruited to a big campus without being an intellectual: Right from his first day he needs a tutor. Roger Ebert’s three star review.
