Lightyear
New member
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2008
- Messages
- 899
I've always thought that "hating small talk" is a way of saying "I can't figure out how to interact with people so I say I'm above it"
Nope. Being German but living in England I have seriously started to despise small-talk. Germans in general don't get the concept of small-talk (Their mindset is something like: "Why should I ask someone 'How are you?' or 'How has your week been?' if I don't really want to know how they are or how their week has been?), they are pretty straightforward and just say what's on their mind.
In contrast the English have this very scripted way of starting a conversation ("How are you?", "How has your week been?" "What are you going to do tomorrow?" "The weather is horrible, isn't it?"), they are trying to be polite and as a German I feel that they are not really interested in me as a person but are just reading from a script out of awkwardness and because sharing your true emotions/thoughts isn't encouraged in English society. I could live with small-talk as an introductory ritual if at some point the conversation would go deeper. But my experience with English people is that they tend to hover for a LONG time (weeks, months, even years) at small-talk level which makes it hard to get to know the real person behind the social etiquette.
I have been going to the same church for almost a year now and spent quite a bit of time with some of the people there but when entering the church for coffee and cake before the service I still feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights, there are loads of people I "know" but I can't talk to them about how I really feel but have to go through the whole small-talk procedure again ("How are you?" "How has your week been?" blah, blah...), which is exhausting and after a while starts to feel like Groundhog Day. So I know how to interact with these people but I have no idea how to get to a level of deeper interaction that I as a non-English person find satisfying so despite having lived in England for almost a decade now I have made quite a few good friends but hardly any of them are English, I just don't know how to build a deep and meaningful relationship with an English person. So yeah, small-talk sucks if it is this neverending, draining experience.