Small Talk, Bigger Problems

Erin Walker

I am terrible at small talk. Don’t invite me to your barbeque. This isn’t to say that I can’t carry on a conversation. In fact, I’ve been accused of being a bonne vivante and even, when a few drinks have been imbibed, a flirt. But those are in social situations where I have some friends milling about. The ability to keep conversation light and airy and casual with strangers or acquaintances eludes me. It could be that I don’t care about sports and find discussions about the weather miserable. (I hate warm, humid weather and live in Louisiana, so I’m really not set up for success here.)

It could be that I hate the artificial concern embedded in the greeting “How are you?” No one really wants to know how you are. They want the perfunctory “fine” followed by “How about this humidity?” or “You see the game last night?” The answer is always “it’s terrible” or “no.”

In the past, I rejected the entire premise. I don’t need small talk, I thought. It’s a banal, bourgeois attempt to make people feel comfortable, but guess what? Life isn’t comfortable! Let’s not pretend anymore; let’s get right to the meat of things. Let’s strip away the bullshit. As the voice-over of the reality

TV show The Real World suggests, let’s stop getting polite and start getting real.

It was 2015 when I tried something different. I was at a Krewe de Vieux party, standing awkwardly by a bowl of Zapps and king cake. After a few haphazard attempts at conversation, I took a risk and introduced my new ice-breaker. Instead of “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, I asked, “What’s your ailment?”. I got a surprised laugh and then an honest response from a bespectacled woman with flowers tattoos crawling up her bare arms.

“I had a herniated disc last year, and it’s still wonky.”

“Really? How’d you herniate your disc?”

“Trapeze.”

“What?!” Already this was more interesting than a conversation about how difficult it was to find parking. And then a few other strangers walked up to the table. They had to answer the same question, “What’s your ailment?”.

“Psoriasis,” said a surprisingly young man. A woman in a pink bob and a copious amount of glitter on her decolletage gleefully shared her strange ailment:

“I have a weird thing where my blood produces too much iron. It’s called hemochromatosis, and I have to give blood once a month so it doesn’t build up in my system.”

“It’s like modern-day bloodletting,” the lanky asthmatic commented.

“Maybe the whole leeches thing worked for some people back in the day?” an anesthesiologist without a gallbladder surmised. Aucafé,ditl'Absinthe, Béraud, 1909

And it snowballed from there. My husband, Mike, who had been watching the parade while I tested out my anti-small-talk-question, came in to get a snack and was greeted by me and a gaggle of new friends and conditions, bonded by our shared vulnerabilities. I introduced him to the crew,

“This is Sheena, she has Type I Diabetes, check out her cool pump. And her partner, Christy, who has TMJ; she wears a mouth guard to keep from clenching at night…”

Mike laughed, shook his head a bit, and then told them all about the Cajun ailment, Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body produces too much bilirubin. Someone Googled bilirubin on their phone, and we all briefly fell down the jaundice rabbit hole, as you do.

This may seem strange and a bit morbid, but it worked. I connected with strangers at a party. Really connected. Begone, trite, insincere greetings! “What’s your ailment?” is the new black. Problem solved.

Except it didn’t always work out so brilliantly. I employed this opening salvo multiple times with great success, but soon discovered, unsurprisingly, that it can go dark fast. To me, ailment connotes something lighter, an annoyance, not a debilitating horrific condition. A weird mole, but you know, not a malignant one.

After a few conversations that were too personal and even worse, boring, I decided that “What’s your ailment?” was not the panacea I had hoped for. And there’s a fine line between authentic connection and over-sharing.

I needed help, so I consulted a variety of sources about how to talk small when you only ever want to talk big. The advice was essentially the same across the board from the Landers Sisters to Reddit to Harvard Business Review. I’ve distilled it to three simple recommendations, so you don’t have to sift through business jargon and clichéd truisms.

1. Keep it light. Commiserate about how the copier/coffee/A/C sucks. The topics should be safe, and probably humdrum, but it’s not about wowing anyone with your inimitable eccentricity or shocking them with a quirky malady.

2. Ask questions and actually listen. Turns out people like it when you show interest in them. We’re social creatures with a penchant for talking about ourselves (e.g., this article).

3. Remember that we’re all awkward. 99% of people appreciate any small gesture to connect. Occasionally, we should be brave enough to build a bridge, even if it’s as simple as “how’s it going?”

And the crux of it all is this: I need to get over myself. Small talk allows communities to build trust. Small talk is an opportunity to briefly acknowledge we’re all in this existential soup together without zapping each other of emotional energy like batshit psychic vampires. We’re also not characters in an Aaron Sorkin drama or partygoers in Oscar Wilde’s salon, lobbing wellcrafted witticisms at one another or revealing deeply-wrought truths about the current state of affairs at every opportunity.

So, what do you think? This [insert type of inclement weather] gonna affect the big [insert sporting event] tonight?