i wonder if, when people say they don’t like small talk, they really mean they don’t like the sort of new precarious interactions that don’t already feel comfortable—
which, me neither really! they’re scary and make me feel so so self-conscious! but also if you don’t engage in those interactions you never make it past them to arrive at comfort with anyone, so the world will just be endlessly lonely for you (and it’s pretty lonely for me, so i know whereof i speak!)
bc like, i saw another post defending small talk as creating space in which you can mutually explore slowly lowering yr respective drawbridges, and like, hard agree with that! it would not make me more comfortable with someone i didn’t already trust to instead jump straight into more intimate talk with them—i tried ~radical vulnerability~ in my 20s, as it happens, with people i wanted very badly to like but couldn’t actually yet trust to hold me up, and guess what! the ground fell away under me every time and it felt dreadful! you have to build the foundation first actually, and if doing that is uncongenial, really that’s information abt its being no fit place to dwell……
but i just wonder. when people say they don’t like small talk. what alternative are they actually envisioning? or have they just accepted the loneliness of a world without it? and in either case why is the response to that assertion so often so angry, as if people were hoping to hammer the resistance to small talk out of those who’ve voiced it—which seems, frankly, like a terrible way to convince them that interpersonal contact doesn’t have to feel bad!
