by Jessica Pan
I know it’s not only me who feels this way. During rush hour in cities, we all stand squashed on public transportation, essentially spooning, in total silence. Sure, I’ll shove my face into your armpit, but talk to you? Never.
I went back for one of those I Talk to Strangers buttons, though. It occurred to me that “chatty tourist” would be a great Halloween costume with which to frighten Londoners.
Anyway, I forgot about the button for years, until I read an article that surprised me: apparently, when people are forced to talk to strangers, it makes them happier.
Around that time, on a flight from New York to London, I found myself sitting in a three-person row with two men. I immediately went into default shutoff mode: I put on my headphones and stared straight ahead. Don’t talk to me, I’m not here. And it seemed to work, because they turned to each other instead. Pretty soon, they were exchanging barbecue recipes, then pouring out their souls and showing each other family pictures on their phones. By the time we touched down at Heathrow, one had invited the other to his birthday party that Friday.
This was astonishing to me. If that’s what had come of a six-hour flight, how much was I missing by ignoring the dozens, if not hundreds, of strangers I saw every day? Was I missing out on life-changing recipes, birthday parties, and sympathetic shoulders to cry on?
Extroverts like spending time with other people, so my first step is to try to get comfortable talking to those other people. The mere idea makes my palms start itching.
And what if I was very bad at it?
Would I be ostracized from English society forever and banished to an island full of the unhinged and the chatty: fellow Americans, those people outside busy train stations trying to save your soul, car salesmen, seven-year-old children, and men in bars with lethally high confidence levels?
Because that seems unfair. I really don’t want to go there, either.
✽ ✽ ✽
On day one, I decide it’s best to start as I mean to go on: face-planting straight into my first potentially life-ruining experiment.
With a deep breath, I walk purposefully up to a woman at the bus stop at 8 a.m. She immediately turns away. I take a seat on the upper deck with the other morning commuters. The woman next to me is immersed in her phone, playing Candy Crush. No one else on the bus is talking. My heart is racing as I practice various opening lines about candy, but then the woman notices me staring at her phone, and I feel as if she just caught me looking down her shirt. I abort the bus mission.
Deflated from my bus failures, I decide to go for some low-hanging fruit. I walk up to an unfamiliar barista at a local café. I can do this, right? I’m just talking to the nice man with the coffee.
“You’re new!” I say, confident that he has to answer because being friendly to customers is part of his job.
“I’ve worked here for three years,” he replies.
The customer next to me laughs.
A small part of me dies.
I’d read that being lonely or isolated is a risk factor for early mortality, which means that, by some stretch, maybe talking to strangers will save my life. Though at the moment, it feels like it’s actually knocking a big chunk of years off it. I’m going to need help. Of the professional variety. But who?
The next day, while holding my I Talk to Strangers button in my hand for whatever the opposite of comfort is, I realize that I will need others along the way to guide me through this year of unknown territory. Experts. Gurus. Mentors. People who will prevent me from extroverting straight off a cliff.
After some quick research, I decide to call Stefan G. Hofmann, director of the Psychotherapy and Emotion Research Laboratory at Boston University—he regularly coaches people through their fear of interacting with others. In a light German accent, he tells me, “Social anxiety is a completely normal experience. We are social animals. We want to be accepted by our peer groups, and we do not want to be rejected. If people do not have any social anxiety, something is seriously wrong with them.”
So that’s something.
I ask Stefan whether he thinks talking to strangers would be easier outside of England, which seems particularly tricky to me. By the time I’m done humiliating myself in this green and pleasant land, I may need to migrate somewhere else.
“I think it depends on the city. For instance, Boston is harder than New York, where they are chattier. And I’m from Germany, where we’re very tied up. You can barely talk to a German. But we are very helpful once you get our attention,” he says.
His experience has shown that an effective treatment for social anxiety is a form of exposure therapy: to put people in their worst-case scenario, where they are guaranteed to be repeatedly rejected. For instance, he might instruct a patient to stand on the side of the road and sing really loudly. Or he’ll have another patient approach one hundred strangers on the train and ask them for $400. Or have someone spill a cup of coffee all over themselves at a very public place, every day.
Just, you know: your basic NIGHTMARES.
But, Stefan explains, “No one is going to fire you or divorce you or arrest you if you do these things.” He has an 80 percent response rate in alleviating anxiety. So there may be method in his madness.
“What . . . what would you prescribe me?” I have to ask.
“Well, what are you afraid of?”
An impromptu therapy session ensues, during which, after some probing, I confess that I’m most scared that a stranger will think I’m weird and stupid.
“Then it would be best if we constructed a conversation where you go up to a stranger and say something completely stupid,” Stefan suggests. “I would have you ask a stranger, ‘Excuse me, I just forgot. Does England have a queen, and, if so, what’s her name?’ You would have to say these exact words and nothing else.”
My heart starts to beat very quickly. But he doesn’t stop talking.
“You also shouldn’t just pick nice old ladies to ask or friendly looking people. And you can’t say, ‘I’m so sorry, I kind of forgot who the Queen is . . .’ because that is safety behavior, and it will prevent you from getting over your fear,” Stefan adds.
“Great,” I say. I’d rather break both my legs in a violent typhoon in a scary, unfamiliar neighborhood than ask strangers in London the dumbest question I can think of.
“What do you think the consequences would be if you did this?”
I tell him I think the stranger would think I was lying, playing a prank, or suffering from amnesia. Or, most likely and—for me—most damning, think I’m an idiot.
“Yes, and then what would happen? Picture it.” I close my eyes.
“They would roll their eyes and walk away. Or, if it’s on the train, everybody will look at me and think I’m stupid and weird.”
“Excellent. Excellent,” Stefan says. “What you’re describing is a realistic scenario we could all live with: you ask someone, they roll their eyes, and they walk away. So the person thinks you’re stupid, and that’s the end. Life goes on. There are millions of people living in the world; there will be some who think that we’re stupid, and that’s fine.”
“I’m finding just the thought of this very stressful,” I say to Stefan.
“Well, you know what I think?” says Stefan.
“What?” I ask.
“How about you try it?”
I laugh nervously. Stefan laughs at my reaction. We laugh. And laugh.
I hang up the phone.
I glance at my sofa and then back to my phone. And at the button in my hand.
“I Talk to Strangers.”
I stand up and grab my coat.
✽ ✽ ✽
I’m so nervous that I think I might get arrested. I probably should be arrested for what I’m about to do: disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. (Is it emotional abuse? I think it may also be emotiona
l abuse.)
A man walks toward me on a London Underground platform. He’s in his early forties, wearing a navy blue suit, and he looks like he’s in a rush. He’s getting closer. And closer.
I wave a hand in front of his face as he passes. He abruptly stops in his tracks and looks at me, surprised.
“Excuse me, I forgot . . .” I say, trailing off.
He looks at me expectantly.
“Uh, is there a queen of England? And, if so, what’s her name?” I splutter.
“The Queen of England?” he repeats, disbelieving, eyebrows raised.
“Yes. Is there one? Who . . . who is she?” I ask.
“It’s Victoria,” he says.
Of all the scenarios I had imagined, this wasn’t one of them.
“Victoria?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“So you’re saying the Queen of England is called Victoria?” Now I’m the disbelieving one.
“Yes,” he says and jumps onto the train. I’m so confused I immediately flag down the next person I see: another man, this one in his twenties, at least six feet tall, dressed in a tracksuit and carrying a gym bag. I ask him the question quickly, and he stares at me with bemused contempt.
“It’s Victoria,” he says and walks off.
OK, extrovert experiment aside—does no one know who the Queen of England is?
Do I even know who the Queen of England is?
Dazed, I stop four women in a row, and each of them tells me, “Elizabeth.” Some laugh in shock, some pause fearfully, and all of them look at me as if I am very slow. One asks if I’m OK. But not one of them calls the police.
And I don’t die.
Stefan was right.
Sure, I now had to have serious doubts about the average British person’s grasp of history and/or current affairs, but me? I’m fine. Better than fine. I am downright giddy after traversing that near-death exercise. I practically skip home, kicking leaves up in the air with joy.
Some people say there is no such thing as a stupid question, but by asking the stupidest of questions, I had finally faced my fear of talking to random strangers.
My confidence was dangerously high. Like, tall-American-men-after-four-beers high. Maybe I could really do this.
The next day, I’m eating alone at a sushi bar, enjoying my lunchtime solitude. Just as I take a bite of spicy tuna, I sneeze violently and spray sushi all over my black jeans. And at that moment, I hear a man’s voice over my shoulder.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
My mouth full of food, my nose running, rice bits everywhere, and a businessman in a suit looking expectantly at me. Oh no. This is terrible. This is horrifying. For both of us.
To the man, I gesture at the chair, nod, and say lamely behind a napkin, “I sneezed. I’m sorry.”
He takes a seat.
I realize there’s nothing I can say that was worse than that sneeze: it’s only up from here. I take a deep breath.
When he finally looks up from his phone, I pounce.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
I’d detected an accent. He’s French. He smiles, then seems to gesture as if to say he’s going to get back to his lunch, but I will not be defeated this easily.
“But where in France? Are you . . . offended by Brexit?” It’s not my best work, but the conversation rolls along nicely enough. (And, yes, he does feel offended by Brexit.)
In the coming days, I discuss the sudden cold weather seven times. “Do you think we’ll get snow this year?” I ask strangers.
No one knows.
“I need coffee,” I say to a woman in her fifties in the line at Pret.
“Yes,” she says. “Coffee is good.”
Everyone in earshot wants to die as well.
It turns out it’s very hard to get past the small talk.
I pet many dogs and pretend it’s an excuse to talk to their owners. I strike up a conversation with the woman next to me at a storytelling event, and we chat about the weather. On the bus, I sit behind a child and her grandmother playing twenty questions. I suddenly interject, “Is it a fox?” They stare at me bewildered but gradually accept my participation (it was a raccoon).
I feel like a kindly village idiot wandering the city. But try as I might, I can’t get past the mundane. Stefan had helped me make contact with strangers. Now I needed someone to help me connect with them.
So I decide to call up my next expert. Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the Chicago Booth School of Business. He’s the psychologist who had started me on this whole adventure when he discovered that when people talk to strangers during their commutes, it makes them happier. I tell him how odd this sounds to me: you’re saying that people actually like talking to each other on the bus or train? Is that not the WORST place to talk to people?
“Well, it seems like the easiest place to me,” he says. “Other places are spots where people are doing other things already. On the train or on the bus, they’re just sitting there, doing nothing.” Or playing Candy Crush.
Nick says that the silent train cars of London are probably a result of pluralistic ignorance: everyone is actually willing to talk but thinks everyone else is unwilling. The train could be full of people who want to strike up a conversation, but it remains silent nonetheless.
So he tested this back in Chicago. Subjects consistently thought they were more interested in talking to their neighbor than their neighbor was in talking to them.
“We polled people and asked: what percentage of people do you think would be willing to talk to you if you talked to them first? People on trains estimated 42 percent would and 43 percent would on the buses.”
They were wrong. The actual percentage of people who would be willing to engage with you in conversation is almost 100 percent. Basically everyone but Morrissey, of the Smiths, who popular legend has it once sat alone in an empty room at a bustling Hollywood house party drinking a cup of tea in silence.
“Obviously, there are people who don’t talk back,” Nick says, “but that wasn’t a common experience.”
I’m taken aback by how Nick talks about this with such confidence.
“So you’re saying that you could come to London and just talk to strangers up and down the London Underground all day long?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” he says.
Arrest this man.
OK, fine, maybe he could do this, but what about introverts who might want to be left alone on their commutes? Did his research compare the reactions of introverts and extroverts?
“We have introverts and extroverts in our experiments. We measure personality in our experiments—and it’s not the case that extroverts are happier talking to strangers than introverts.”
This surprises me. And gives me a little bit of hope about the rest of the year.
I bring up the problem I’ve been having: I can’t seem to get past small talk. I’m not having any of those amazing connections: it’s just the weather, or what’s your dog’s name, or what do you do. Or who’s the Queen.
“Just the weather?” Nick sounds disappointed. “Can you do it better?” he asks.
Of course I could do it better. If I were someone else. But I’m abysmal at this—I don’t know HOW to do it better.
“You need to self-disclose more. Share more about yourself. Ask them personal questions.”
As Nick coaches me through meaningful conversation topics—what do you like about your job, tell me about your family, where’s the most interesting place you’ve been to this year—I realize that I’m a grown woman having a lesson on how to have a conversation.
I also realize that I did not know how to have a conversation with new people.
But if you think about it, no one taught us how to do this. OK, technically, life did, but I’ve come across so many peop
le who are also pretty bad at this: they ask no questions, they ramble, they don’t listen, they interrupt, or they ask too many questions and offer up nothing of themselves.
Talking is what bonds us to other people the most, and we are supposed to learn this through experience out in the real world, but I’d spent that time hibernating with a book.
All of this offering up something personal made me feel the old clammy twinge of fear of rejection.
Then Nick reminds me that social life is governed by reciprocity.
“A few years ago, I was driving through a remote part of Ethiopia, and I kept passing all these mothers and children outside of their mud huts. Everybody I passed stared at me like I was dead: totally blank facial expressions. It was the most uncomfortable I’d ever felt in my life.
“But then it occurred to me, while I was sitting there: I was looking at them in exactly the same way they’re looking at me. So I started smiling and waving as I went by—and it was like I flipped a switch. As soon as I started smiling, waving, and looking friendly, they started waving from their windows, grinning at me, and running out of their houses to give me high fives.
“That’s the truth of the world, Jessica,” he says, casually full-naming me to let me know something big is coming. “Nobody waves—but everybody waves back.”
I hear his mic drop all the way from Chicago.
✽ ✽ ✽
Later that week, as I’m walking through my neighborhood, I see a man painting on the street. I remember that I need to be the first to wave. I tell myself that he has kind eyes to pump myself up for the encounter. Once I say hello, he puts down his paintbrush, and we chitchat about the area (I chitchat these days), then he surprises me. He invites me to a private art show at someone’s house the following week. And that’s how, a few days later, I end up in an enormous house: three stories tall, high ceilings, Picasso prints on the walls; my entire apartment would fit in the kitchen. I make a vow to myself: I will get past small talk. Tonight, I will learn from these people. Tonight, I will self-disclose.
