Americans are terrible at small talk

In the four years I’ve lived in the United States, I have grown used to excruciatingly sincere exchanges with people. Within minutes of meeting you, they’ll come up with the heavy goods, and expect to see yours in return. Recent specimens I’ve collected? Americans are good at a great many things: normalizing drone warfare, making cherry-flavored jellies taste more like cherries than cherries themselves, optimism. But they struggle with small talk. In Ireland, small talk is just that — I mean, it’s tiny. At the beginning of a threehour train trip to Cork from Dublin, I spend an average of 15 minutes comfortably discussing the merits of having a cafe car on the train with the middle-aged man beside me. I suppose, if you’re peckish, it’s ideal, really. A nice pause. But the tea costs more than my ticket. Eyes widen and head nods in agreement. But you can’t dip chocolate in your ticket. A chuckle. What the seemingly meaningless exchange means is we can relax. The person we’re inches away from for the afternoon is not dangerous. At the end of the trip we’ll nod and smile, and I won’t be left wondering why his father said that one thing in 1994 that meant he never had the confidence to pursue a career in architecture. The last kids’ birthday party I attended was in Brooklyn, where the adults stick around and it kind of blends into the evening. I was chatting with this one cool-guy dad with a pale ale in his hand, and he opened up within 30 seconds. “Something people don’t talk about enough is how hard parenting really is, and sometimes you’re just not going to like your kids,” he said. All I’d asked was whether he was in line for the bouncy castle. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, actually, two other people at the same party had said more or less the same thing to me just minutes earlier. Was this disgruntled trio just unlucky, with a slew of particularly unlikable children between them? No. They were simply saying what was on their minds. You see, there’s nothing Americans don’t talk about. That should come as a relief to me, growing up in a repressed, Catholic country where my mother explained rape to us as “when someone loves you, but you don’t want them to.” In truth, this extraordinary level of openness I find here is a relief, but it also feels a little like a loss. I understand that openness beats secrecy and that taboos should be challenged. It’s just that I don’t always want to dive right in. Time and energy are resources, and New Yorkers never have enough of either because of capitalism and self-absorption. Their technique is to get straight to it, and that can be off-putting. Besides, believing and acting on this no-nonsense “who exactly are you?” school of conversation neglects the fact that small talk, when done correctly, is actually an extremely efficient way of getting acquainted with people. You may not find out where they work, or who they know, or how their relationship is with their family, but you’ll get some idea of that odd-shaped part of a human being that’s invisible to the eye and impossible to articulate. Are they kind, hurting, silly or bad? Some combination of all of those? You can find out, if you ask them about the party food, or tell them about your blouse, or bring up the oddly cloudless sky outside, and simply take it from there. In one fateful 20-minute Google session a few years ago, I applied for and was accepted into both a yoga teacher-training course and a mentoring program for girls. The same week in September saw the first day of both courses, yoga on Saturday mornings, mentoring on Saturday afternoons. It was all falling into place; soon I’d be some kind of supple superhero flanked by a bevy of intellectually powerful young women who would look upon me favorably after they’d taken over the world. That first Saturday, I noticed the same woman in both courses, a serene-looking person with a resting saint face. I was struck by what I thought was an incredible coincidence — can you even imagine two nice, helpful white writer ladies who are also interested in deepening their yoga practice? Well, you don’t even have to imagine, because it happened! I introduced myself to her after the mentoring workshop, and we chatted about the funny coincidence. The following week, after yoga, it made sense to walk together to the subway to get into the city for the mentoring. She sighed a tiny bit as we waited for the F train, and I sensed the sigh was not directed solely at the tiresome weekend subway schedule. The train arrived, and we found seats side by side. I confessed to her that my heels have never touched the ground in a downward dog. Harmless little opener, I felt. She took her phone out as a defense as fast as you could say, “So what?” She reflexively asked where I was from. I told her. She seemed despondent, but soldiered on. “When did you move here?” “A couple of years ago.” Suddenly exhausted, she said, “Remind me to ask you about your story when I’m less, like, crazy busy.” That is how it came to pass that, instead of some small talk leading to an easy quietness, Warrior One sat beside Warrior Two in tense silence as they both scrolled through their phones. My reluctant companion believed that conversation had to be all or nothing, either teetering on ice or plunging into the unknown waters beneath. She didn’t know she just had to pull on a pair of skates and twirl around for a while. That elegance was not accessible to her, I thought, as I spied a dog in a bag under the seat opposite us. His little black eyes shone. I get it; words are laughably inadequate when it comes time to express ourselves. My brain is so close to my mouth, yet in the time it takes for a thought to travel between the two and become a sentence, the meaning is diluted and fudged to something I don’t really mean at all. But words are all we have when it comes to telling someone who we are, so we are duty-bound to at least try. I didn’t want a vapid exchange, and indepth conversation wouldn’t have been appropriate either, and I had no intention of launching into either. The perfect in-between connection was small talk, but we missed that connection, so I was just a woman alone on the subway, smiling at a schnauzer.