I overheard a bit of a conversation the other day. Person A and Person B were chatting away – flirting away, if you ask me – and then came along one of those silences as they both tried to figure out what to say next. When this happens, it can be disastrous if it goes on too long. I think we’ve all been there. As you approach seven, eight seconds, one of you inevitably makes a judgement call and ends the conversation. Anything up to four or five seconds, though, can be used to your advantage. It gives you time to recuperate, to remind yourself that you don’t need to ask them out right now, and that if they do actually like you (they don’t, taunts your brain), it’ll still be the case tomorrow (presumptuous).

This particular silence went on for eleven seconds, and things didn’t look good. I made the prediction that Person B (who was more fidgety and less able to maintain eye contact) would go in for a “this is awkward, isn’t it?” A bold move, a sort of simulation-breaker. More often than not it just makes the whole thing ten times more awkward, but occasionally it can end up being a moment of tactical genius, drawing out first polite laughter, then genuine laughter, and finally a monologue about awkwardness and how “real” you are for addressing it. Bullsh*t, you think, rightly so. But it’s valuable bullsh*t. And given a few more seconds, I reckon that’s a route that an increasingly desperate Person B would have taken.

As it happened, though, Person A came up with something, and just in the nick of time too: “You know, I’ve never talked to you before but you’re actually really interesting.”
It felt like pretty forced dialogue – I was tempted to chime in with the timeless “from my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”, which is undoubtedly the best line in all of Star Wars – but as far as I could tell, it did the trick. The conversation got up and running again, and yet I found myself unable to be happy for them. I lost focus on what was being said – something about that sentence had bothered me – so for all I know they changed the subject to the creepy guy who was listening in on their conversation.

"I’ve never talked to you before but you’re actually really interesting."

Is the “but” in that sentence implying that Person A thinks that they know everyone who is interesting in the world, that it’s a surprise to them that someone who they don’t know might be – God forbid – interesting? Call me a pedant, but I couldn’t let go of it.

Equally, of course, it could have been just a case of stringing a sentence together that checked a few basic boxes (coherent, check; slight compliment, check; hints at future conversation, check). The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that that’s probably all it was.
Either way, it diverted my train of thought to a completely different track. Whether or not these two people got their happy ending no longer interested me: I was busy thinking about how self-obsessed and narrow-minded we all are. It can be easy to forget that everyone else is a fully fleshed-out character with hopes and dreams and loves and flaws, especially when it’s someone who you only come into contact with for, say, twenty minutes a week. ‘Forget’ might not be the right word. It’s more that we don’t consider it. Fair enough – one life gives you enough to think about, but it does encourage me to take more of an interest in people.

I mean, how often do you find yourself in a conversation where you’re not so much listening to what the other person has to say as thinking about what stupid sh*t you want to say next? If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably quite often. Well, at least I weave my irrelevant bullsh*t into the conversation in a way that makes it seem relevant, and I hope you do too.

Anyway, the point is, it’s pretty unifying to look round once in a while and remember that everyone you can see has to sh*t, that every now and then they all wipe too hard and for too long and end up walking around with a sore bum. Today, that was me, but tomorrow, it could be anyone. And who knows, they might actually be really interesting.