by Jessica Pan
I walk with purpose through the halls and see a well-dressed, intimidating man in his sixties, alone. I’m nervous about talking to him, so I hover near him, and he keeps walking past me. Finally, I decide to bite the bullet. I jump out of the corner at him like a nightmare.
“Hi, I’m Jess,” I say. “Where do you live?” Suddenly, hearing my voice aloud, I’m aware this is both a basic thing to say and also—depending on how you hear it—a terrifying thing to say.
It turns out that Malcolm lives on a beautiful, quiet square that I run by most days.
Disclose something about yourself, I hear Nick’s voice in my ear. Ask him what you really want to know.
“I peek into the windows of those houses nearly every day,” I say. “With the massive kitchens that extend into courtyards and the amazing gardens at the back. I pretend to live there sometimes. I’ve always wanted to know: is that the best place to live in the entire world?”
“It is,” he says.
He walks away.
No one said this would be easy.
I scour the house for my next victim and meet a fifty-year-old named Dave who’s been reinventing himself as a stand-up comedian. He initiates conversation first when we are both standing in front of an abstract painting that looks like a sick walrus. We trade tips on fighting writer’s block, which he tells me is cured by drinking red wine and listening to Rod Stewart. So far, so good.
I keep circulating (I circulate these days) and near the end of the night end up in a conversation with the artist from the street, Roger, who invited me. He steers the conversation toward his paintings.
“Art is the only thing that makes sense to me,” he says. “It’s light, texture, and . . .”
No. No no no. I do not want to talk about the virtues of art at this art show. I think: what do I really want to know about this gentle, soft-spoken man?
“Roger, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” I ask. I can’t believe I’ve just asked that. I briefly wonder whether he’s going to laugh in my face.
Instead, he thinks for a moment, contemplating with his glass of wine. “Well, I burned down the art department at my school when I was a teenager.”
Bingo.
In my past life, I would have walked straight past this man. Now, here I am at the fanciest party I’ve ever been to, discovering his past felonies, and all because I stopped to say hello. And the research is right: it brings me joy. I mean, it’s not as fun as rereading I Capture the Castle by a fire in a log cabin, but it’s not the worst.
The party inspires me to keep going. This doesn’t mean that I stop feeling nervous before each encounter—I do. But it’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. Take a breath and, after the initial shock, the painful part is over. On the train home one night that week, I’m sitting next to a man and trying to work up my nerve to talk to him. But I also don’t want him to think I’m hitting on him.
“Hi,” I finally say. “Where’d you get that blazer? My husband is looking for one just like it.” Subtle AF.
At first, he recoils in surprise and clutches his bag close to his chest. Then he recovers. “Finland,” he tells me. This is not useful information, but the Band-Aid is now off.
After his initial shock, the Finnish man starts asking me questions. He tells me he’s lived in London for five years; we discover we both love the TV show 30 Rock. Talking to him on a cold, rainy night is much better than sitting in stony silence carefully avoiding eye contact. It isn’t the deepest of conversations, but as he stands up to get off at his stop, he turns to me and says, “What a nice surprise it was to meet you tonight.”
I’m left sitting there with the other passengers who had been staring at us like we were a science experiment.
And we are. We are my science experiment. And I think it might be going very well.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sitting in the classroom, I steal a glance at the man in the plaid shirt and rolled-up jeans as the instructor, Mark, sets up the next slide in his presentation in front of us.
Mark points to a slide of an Edward Hopper painting of a forlorn woman staring out of the window.
“As people, we are extremely vulnerable. We are tiny, insignificant, little things on this big planet, hurtling through space, in a big galaxy. We are so vulnerable that if a branch from a tree falls onto our head, it will kill us.”
I lower my body in my seat and touch the back of my neck protectively.
“We need allies to survive, hence the need for sociability. We all seek deep connections with other people, but as we get older, loneliness is an unavoidable part of life,” he says, gesturing to the Hopper painting again.
The class is called “How to Be Sociable,” at the School of Life, the brainchild of best-selling author Alain de Botton. This is where I meet the tall man in rolled-up jeans who I will confess all my fears and insecurities to.
I didn’t know what to expect at a class that promises to teach you how to be sociable. When I was twelve, my mother made me attend one evening at a cotillion class, an etiquette program popular in the South for teaching manners. I think it may have also been an effort to make me less shy. I spent the night scared that the teacher, a dainty woman called Mrs. Flowers, who prowled the room in kitten heels with a microphone, was going to call on me. Then she put her mic down, and I spent the rest of the night catatonic while being forced to dance the fox-trot with a twelve-year-old boy with sweaty hands. It was mortifying, and it set me back years. I pray this night will not be similar.
The evening class takes place in a basement, and there are about forty people of all ages there. Our instructor, Mark, is jocular and confident as he stares out at us, and we, the good people of this pocket of London, stare back at him.
I don’t know what brought these thirty-nine other people to this class, but Britain was recently dubbed the loneliness capital of Europe, so I’m assuming one factor is loneliness. A recent study says that staring at our phones and ignoring people has become our new normal, which is probably also why we have forgotten how to be around our own species.
Loneliness has been declared a health epidemic, and spending time with each other is the obvious cure. To do so, Mark tells us, we need to talk to each other. But, he stresses, that doesn’t just mean everyday small talk, but deep, meaningful conversation that makes us feel connected to another person. Which is exactly what Nick had told me about trying to have more personal conversations. I think back to Nick’s advice that I applied at the gallery house party—that guy really seemed to know what he was talking about.
Honestly, I’m kind of happy to have permission to dive right into more interesting territory, because I have a very real allergy to small talk. I don’t want to discuss jobs and weather and how people’s commutes are. Introverts tend to hate chitchat (it’s an awkward social interaction but also meaningless and unrewarding), but this kind of enriching conversation that Mark is referring to is incredibly rare and hard to come by, something I had already found out on the streets of London.
We’re told that we can engineer conversations to be more emotional and interesting by understanding that we all have a “Surface Self” and a “Deep Self.” The Surface Self talks about the weather, facts, what we had for dinner, our plans for the weekend. The Deep Self talks about what these things actually mean to us and how we feel about them.
Deep Self holds on to our fears, our hopes, our loves, our insecurities, our dreams. Surface Self is preoccupied with logistics, facts, details, admin. Deep Self is the wedding vows; Surface Self is the wedding planner. Deep Self likes to stare into your eyes talking about your secret desires, while Surface Self keeps checking out of the conversation to plan their shopping list. I prefer to understand it like this: Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s on the Wall is Surface Self (“Jumpin’, Jumpin’,” “Bug a Boo,” “Bills, Bills, Bills”). Beyoncé’s Lemonade is Deep Self (“Pra
y You Catch Me,” “Daddy Lessons,” “Don’t Hurt Yourself”). Got it?
Mark shows us a short video of a dinner party. In it, a man describes his commute in detail, before asking the woman across from him what she studied at college and droning on about what he majored in. Then she begins talking about her favorite vegetarian recipes. This is an example of “shallow conversation.” It feels eerily familiar to every (rare) dinner party I have attended.
In another clip, a different man mentions the death of his mother, before he brushes it off and swiftly moves on to soccer. Then he’s abruptly interrupted by a woman who asks him how he feels about the death of his mother, given that it was so soon after her divorce from his father. How was he coping with both those things happening at once? The woman is kind in the video, but she also feels slightly invasive.
Mark stops the video. “You might think, ‘Maybe he didn’t want to talk about his mother and it was rude of her to ask,’ but he’s the one who brought her up. He did want to talk about it, but he couldn’t find a way in,” he says. “People are usually very happy to answer personal questions if they feel the person asking them is genuine and kind.”
A woman in front of me “uh-huhs” in audible agreement.
A man in his thirties raises his hand. “But people don’t always want to share their personal feelings and life, right? Some people might hate that.”
Mark turns to him. He tells him, sure, maybe, but the fear of being intrusive is hugely exaggerated. The more important point is this: what we should actually fear is being boring and dying having never connected with anyone.
Then he stares at all of us, meaningfully, and says it again, slowly. “The fear and bleak reality of being boring and dying having never connected with anyone is vastly underestimated.”
Mark then claps his hands and asks half of the class to turn to the stranger sitting to our right and offer them a fact about us or something going on in our lives. It’s up to the other person to make sure to steer the conversation away from the superficial and into the deep, emotional, rewarding territory.
I turn to the woman sitting to the right of me. Her name is Lindsay. American. She’s from Alabama. She’s wearing pearls and a black cashmere sweater.
I bait her. “I’m going to Texas soon to visit my family,” I say. God, she could go anywhere with this. Family. Tensions with family. A return to America fraught with anxiety or possible longing and regret.
“Oh . . . that’s a long flight. How long is that flight?” Lindsay asks.
“Eleven hours,” I say. Too surface, Lindsay.
“Wait, let me try again. Are you . . . um . . . are you going to go shopping? Damn it!” she says.
Like a wise guru, I silently gesture for her to try again.
“Are you looking forward to sunny weather?” she ventures.
Lindsay cannot do this. She cannot ask a deep question. I had thought that Americans might be better at this than Brits.
Come on, Lindsay. Ask me about my family. Ask me if sometimes I lie awake wondering why I moved so far away from them when every year I miss them more. Is it really just because London has good plays and nice cafés and newspapers I’d like to write for? Ask me something real, Lindsay.
The conversations between the pairs around us are swirling, deep and intimate, but Lindsay is now asking me whether I’m looking forward to eating Mexican food in Texas. I can’t hide my disappointment. The bell rings, indicating that it’s my turn to dig deep into Lindsay’s psyche.
But first she has to state a fact about herself. She takes a breath. And says nothing.
She can’t think of anything to say about herself. Fair enough. Maybe she was nervous. I decide to take the lead.
“How long have you lived in England?” I ask.
“Five years,” she says.
“What brought you here?” I ask. I’m still staying shallow but need something to work with.
“My husband’s work transferred him here.”
I nod, looking into her brown eyes.
“How do you spend your days?”
“Usually just at home with the kids.”
I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna go deep.
“Are you in this class because you’re finding it hard to make friends?” I say, jumping straight in.
“I just thought it might be interesting,” she says.
She’s deflecting. She’s not going deep. She’s staying on the surface. I have leaped into the cold, deep water, and she is standing on the shore, clutching her pearls, not even putting her swimsuit on.
“Oh, well, I just thought . . .” I begin. But no. Screw it. The point is to get to the vulnerable.
“Are you lonely, Lindsay?” I ask, gently.
“LONELY? I am not lonely,” she bellows.
“It’s OK if you are,” I say.
“I am not lonely,” she repeats again, a little more quietly.
You are, I think. We all are. I think back to that Edward Hopper painting. We’re all going to die alone, especially Lindsay.
All right, FINE, maybe that wasn’t the intended message. And yes, OK, sure, I spend only five minutes with Lindsay, and we are complete strangers, but I am looking for that lightning bolt of connection. On second thought, though, Lindsay would have aced Mrs. Flowers’s cotillion course, where we were told dinner conversations were to always be polite and pleasant. Seeing as she was from Alabama, maybe she’d taken the course herself.
The bell rings, and I face forward again.
For the second part of class, Mark tells us that sharing our vulnerabilities and insecurities is the quickest way to make a real connection with someone. Most people want to boast about their lives, but this leaves people feeling jealous or resentful.
“It’s not that we want others to fail, but we need to know that our own sorrows have echoes in other people’s lives. That’s what connects us. Strength may be impressive, but it’s vulnerability that builds friendships,” Mark says.
I think back to when I really bonded with my childhood best friend, Jori. We’d known each other since we were ten, but we became true best friends when we were fourteen, perhaps the most fragile moment of adolescence. Jori was refreshingly open and vulnerable to me about so many things: her crushes, her flaws, who she was jealous of in school, how her first kiss was with a very handsome French boy (who stole her digital camera and gave her a nasty stomach virus) in Paris on a school trip. Her unflinching honesty made me feel like I could tell her anything without judgment, and we became fiercely close.
I switch seats and am paired with a second girl, this one in ballet flats and black tights who is so lithe that she could be twelve but is probably twenty-two. On a screen, Mark posts a list of questions to help spark vulnerable conversations. I read one off the screen to her.
“Tell me about one of your regrets,” I ask her.
“I don’t have any regrets,” she says.
“You have zero regrets?”
“Yep,” she says.
“None? Really?”
“Well, I am really happy with my life, so if I changed anything, then it wouldn’t have turned out this way, would it?”
Oh, come on. This wasn’t some “butterfly effect” question where just talking about one change throws off the entire course of your life—this was a conversation of hypotheticals. Besides, this was boasting! Blatant boasting! Boasting is illegal here—I briefly consider reporting her to Mark.
Mercifully, the bell rings, and I return to my seat. Maybe I am the one who is doing this all wrong. I’d been paired with two women who weren’t exactly naturals at the Deep Talk, but maybe I was expecting too much.
And then comes the kicker: “vulnerability tennis.”
Mark, in his now slightly know-it-all tone, tells us, “We think to be interesting we have to be impressive—but sharing our failure co
nnects us more than sharing our success.”
For our next exercise, we are to face a new partner and bat our insecurities and fears and emotions back and forth, like Serena and Venus Williams, except instead of volleys and serves flying at 120 mph, it’s deep confessions and secrets, which actually hurt about the same as getting pegged by a tennis ball straight in the boob.
The only rules in this game are that we can’t comment on the other person’s statements. Our only response is an equally embarrassing confession. Like a loser-off.
And that’s how I meet Chris.
“Sometimes I think I just want to have a baby because I’m afraid of dying alone,” I say to him.
He takes this in, his face giving away nothing.
“I feel inferior to my coworkers at my job and have regrets about not going to college,” he says. “Actually, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to have gone to college.”
See, THIS is something I can work with.
Compared to Lindsay and the woman with zero regrets, Chris is a worthy opponent.
And as Mark had predicted, I feel a connection with Chris after our “tennis match.” We’ve just been through a brutal series of personal revelations and have crawled out on the other side, exhausted but filled with endorphins. It feels like that deep relief that comes after a really good cry. The shared emotional turmoil means that, despite having only just met, I feel a kinship with Chris, especially because he was so willing, honest, and nonjudgmental. During the exercise, we were both aware of how ridiculous this scenario was, and before each of us said our statements of truth, we both did a weak little laugh, so it sounded something like, “Hahaha here goes my deepest, darkest secret that I truly hate about myself—enjoy! Haha . . . sometimes I cry myself to sleep at night so hard it wakes up my neighbors . . . Hahaha . . .”
But, awkward laugh or not, it is so much easier to say these things to a total stranger. Someone who knows nothing about you can’t judge you properly or tell your secrets to anyone you know. It’s liberating. It’s also surprising what they’re willing to tell you, too. If you saw Chris on the street, you would assume he had everything. He’s good-looking, he has a respectable job, he’s married to a successful woman, and he supports a UK soccer team that consistently performs well.
