Reclaiming Conversation (21 page)

For Williams, the empathic relationship does not begin with “I know how you feel.” It begins with the realization that you
don't
know how another feels. In that ignorance, you begin with an offer of conversation: “Tell me how you feel.” Empathy, for Williams, is an offer of accompaniment and commitment. And making the offer changes you. When you have a growing awareness of how much you don't know about someone else, you begin to understand how much you don't know about yourself. You learn, says Williams, “a more demanding kind of attention. You learn patience and a new skill and habit of perspective.”

When you give someone a thumbs-up or respond to a question posed on Instagram, these can be first steps in an empathic process. In the online exchange, you might be saying to someone else, “I want to hear you. I'm with you.” Like the consolation texts that Natalie receives, they are a beginning. Everything depends on what happens next.

S
o many of us have friendships with people we could, with planning, see face-to-face but choose instead to “see” online. We become accustomed to experiencing this “convenience” as the normal way to spend time together.

Across generations, we get used to rerouting conversations—from sharing birthday wishes to sending condolences—to our screens. We no longer expect friends to show up and may not want them to. It starts to feel like too much emotional work.

There is so much positive in what online relationships can bring us. Someone like Alli, socially isolated, distant from her parents, can use the Internet to reach out—to try to find someone who speaks directly to her problem. But perhaps not to her. Empathy is not merely about giving someone information or helping them find a support group. It's about convincing another person that you are there for the duration. Empathy means staying long enough for someone to believe that you want to know how they feel, not that you want to tell them what you would do in their circumstance. Empathy requires time and emotional discipline.

The essayist William Deresiewicz said that as our communities have atrophied, we have moved from living in actual communities to making efforts to feel as though we are living in them. So, when we talk about communities now, we have moved “
from a relationship to a feeling
.” We have moved from
being
in a community to having a
sense
of community. Have we moved from empathy to a
sense
of empathy? From friendship to a
sense
of friendship? We need to pay close attention here. Artificial intelligences are being offered to us as sociable companions. They are being called a new kind of friend. If we are settling for a “sense of friendship” from people, the idea of machine companionship does not seem like much of a fall. But what is at stake is precious, the most precious things that people know how to offer each other.

A
s I write this chapter, my computer develops a glitch and I make my way to the Apple Store. My problem is so minor that I don't even need the Genius Bar—an Apple salesperson knows how to help. I sit alongside a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in design who teaches me how to make my computer hum. He asks what I do and when I tell him I'm writing a book about conversation, he says, speaking of his clients at the store, “I worry about the young kids. Some seem so desensitized. It's like they have never had a conversation without their phones out. But some—well, some—give me hope. Like they're over it.”

I know what he means. I also see a next generation that shows some evidence of pulling back from where momentum would take them. A few fourteen-year-old girls share their reservations about texting and the bonds of friendship. Liz says that “memories don't happen when you get a text. It's the stories you can tell.” Ginger appreciates that “when you text and message, you don't mess up.” But then she adds that the important moments with her friends, “the funny moments,” come precisely from messing up and making mistakes. “The best stuff,” she says, “is friends making mistakes together. . . . If you're talking you can mess up and it turns into something really funny. That's how people bond. . . . It's not like everything is made to be perfect. It's like you should make mistakes and you should—well, with friends, it's good to see their faces.” For Ginger's classmate Sabrina, the “perfect” exchanges of texting aren't “conversations that mean anything real.”

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied the “real” conversations of friendship. Some friendships, he says, are built around conversations that provide validation. He calls these “reinforcement friendships”:
They accomplish “what everyone likes
 . . . reciprocal attention paid to one another's ideas and idiosyncrasies.” These are perhaps Haley's “hoarded” friends, who will text her if she texts them first. These are perhaps her Facebook friends: If you “like” what is on their wall, they will “like” what is on yours. Csikszentmihalyi says that what these
friendships do best is support a self that needs to use other people as a mirror, a self that has not found itself.

But Thoreau spoke of more (“
My friend is one
 . . . who takes me for what I am”), and Csikszentmihalyi writes about the possibility of more. There are friends who question each other's dreams and desires, who encourage each other to try out the new. “A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that
any increase in complexity entails
.”

Tellingly, Csikszentmihalyi describes a “true friend” by describing friendship in action—among other things, in conversation. He is describing intimacy.

Again, I think of the “young kids” who gave hope to my Apple consultant. I think they take their devices for granted and for that are perhaps less enamored with them than their parents and many of their only slightly older peers.

One fifteen-year-old reflects on how hard it is to talk to the kids at school. Right now, he is at summer camp. There will be no phones for the six weeks he'll be there. He's okay with that.

When I am at home and in the car with a friend or on the bus and I am trying to make conversation [with other kids] . . . they could be on their phones. And the conversation could be kind of spotty. They're drifting in and out of what they're talking about. They aren't really focusing, so the conversation kind of breaks down. But when you're here, you have each other to focus on . . . and not just your electronics. So I think you can really focus on what people say and then add on more to the conversation—you have more thoughts shared than in those conversations where you have your phones out and you are taking the fullness out of the conversation.

His bunkmates support his point by bringing up a recent wilderness hike, a three-day trek where they had each other's company without any
hope of phones. One of them remarks on how much, at home, he talks with his friends about what is on their phones. On the hike, he says, “What I noticed was that we were only focusing on ourselves and what was right in front of us and in the moment.” Another remarks that while he was on the hike, the people he was with were not competing with the people he could potentially reach on his phone. “When I am at home, I don't really get to sit down next to someone . . . and just talk with them. There are always other things going on, their phone is always out, they're talking to other people.” For this young man, conversation itself seemed a revelation—a large, new space. He says, “It was a stream, very ongoing. It wouldn't break apart.”

Where Are You? Who Are You? Wait, What Just Happened?

I only ask, “How's the conversation?”

—OPERA SINGER LUCIANO PAVAROTTI, WHEN ASKED ABOUT RAISING ONLY DAUGHTERS

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

—ALAIN DE BOTTON

F
or adults as for teenagers, it comes down to this: You always expect other people to have their phones with them. You expect that no matter what else they are doing, they will see a message you sent. So, if they care about you, you should be getting a text back. If they care. But in romantic texting, responding to a communication with silence happens all the time. It's the NOTHING gambit. It appeared early. As soon as texting had established itself in flirting, there was talk about how to handle the strategy of silence. Even in high school.

I
n 2008, eighteen-year-old Hannah tells me that in online flirting, “the hardest thing” is that the person you text has the option of simply not responding—that is, of responding with NOTHING, a conversational choice not really available in face-to-face talk. Her assessment of its effects: “It is a way of driving someone crazy. . . . You don't exist.”

Hannah explains that after a no-response, she feels a strong temptation to make things worse for herself by following the online activities of the boy who ignored her—on Facebook she can see if he's been out to dinner or a party. In the past, you could console yourself that a person ignoring you was perhaps busy with a family emergency. You could tell yourself all manner of improbable stories. Now, as one of Hannah's friends puts it, “You have to cope with the reality: they are busy with everything but you.” Hannah says that this makes rejection on social media “five times as great as regular rejection.”

The NOTHING gambit is not a resolved conversation or a conversation that has trailed off. It is not, Hannah insists, like “someone telling you a few times that they are busy and then you get the picture.” It is more like a conversation with someone who simply looks away as if they don't understand that human beings need to be responded to when they speak. Online, we give ourselves permission to behave this way.

And when it happens to you, the only way to react with dignity is to pretend it didn't happen. Hannah describes the rules: If people don't respond to you online, your job is to pretend to not notice. “I'm
not
going to be that person who goes off on people saying, ‘Why don't you get back to me, blah, blah, blah.' . . . Not cool. I'm
not
going to be, like, ‘Hello, are you still there? If you don't want to talk, just tell me.'”

Hannah and I are talking in a circle of seven high school seniors, boys and girls. When she says, “Why don't you get back to me, blah, blah, blah,” everyone breaks out laughing. Hannah is doing a perfect imitation of a pathetic loser. The behavior she describes is what no one would ever do. When someone hits you with a no-response, you meet
silence with silence. Hannah is explicit: “If people want to disappear, I'll be, like, ‘Okay, I'm fine with it.'” In fact, in Hannah's circle, the socially correct response to the NOTHING gambit is to get aggressively busy on social media—busy enough that your activity will be noticed by the person who has gone silent on you.

In the early days of texting, 2008–2010, I spoke with more than three hundred teens and young adults about their online lives. I saw a generation settle into a new way of dealing with silence from other people: namely, deny that it hurts and put aside your understanding that if you do it to others, it will hurt them as well. We tolerate that we are not being shown empathy. And then we tolerate that we don't show it to others.

This style of relating is part of a larger pattern. You learn to give your parents a pass when they turn to their phones instead of responding to you. You learn to give your friends a pass when they drop in and out of conversations to talk with friends on their phones. And in flirtation, you learn to treat NOTHING as something to put out of your mind.

You could say that in romance, being ignored is a staple and that this is old wine in new bottles. But in the past, the silent treatment was a moment. It could be the beginning of a chase or what led a suitor to abandon hope. But it was a moment. Now, as we've seen before, a moment has turned into a method.

E
ven the apps we use to find love are in formats that make it easy to ignore being ignored. On Tinder, a mobile dating app, rejection is no longer rejection, it is “swiping left,” and when it happens to you, you don't even know it happened. Tinder asks, “Who is available, right now, near you, to go out for a coffee or a drink, to maybe be your lover?” People who want to be considered sign up, and their photograph and a brief bio appear on the system.

Once you have the app open, if you like the looks of someone, you swipe right on your phone. If you're not interested, you swipe left. If
I swipe right on you and you swipe right on me, then we are notified that we have been “matched” and can begin to communicate. But if I choose you with a right swipe and you don't do the same for me, you simply don't appear in my visual field again.

This is what people mean by “friction-free,” the buzzword for what a life of apps can bring us. Without an app, it would not be possible to reject hundreds, even thousands of potential mates with no awkwardness. It has never been easier to think of potential romantic partners as commodities in abundance.

In this social environment, studies show a decline in the ability to form secure attachments—the kind
where you trust and share your life
. Ironically, our new efficient quests for romance are tied up in behavior that discourages empathy and intimacy. The preliminaries of traditional courtship, the dinner dates that emphasized patience and deference, did not necessarily lead to intimacy but provided practice in what intimacy requires. The new preliminaries—the presentation of candidates as if in a game—don't offer that opportunity.

This chapter is primarily about love talk during the chase. It involves new skills. You'll want a fluidity with apps that will become part of your romantic game—apps for meeting, apps for texting and messaging, apps for video chat. All of these bring the promise of businesslike crispness to falling in love. They bring efficiency into the realm of our intimacies. In a world where people live far away from parents and neighborhood ties, apps bring hope that they will smooth out the hard job of finding a partner without the community connections enjoyed by previous generations. And so, the first story that young people tell about technology and romance is that their phones have made things more efficient. But the first story is not the whole story.

In fact, technology brings significant complications to the conversations of modern romance. We feel we have permission to simply drop out. It encourages us to feel that we have infinite choice in romantic partners, a prospect that turns out to be as stressful as it is helpful in finding a mate. It offers a dialogue that is often not a dialogue at all
because it is not unusual for people to come to online conversations with a team of writers. You want a team because you feel you are working in an unforgiving medium. Timing matters and punctuation counts!

Finally, although technology offers so much to the chase—new ways to meet, new ways to express interest and passion—it also makes a false promise. It is easy to think that if you feel close to someone because of their words on a screen, you understand the person behind them. In fact, you may be overwhelmed with data but have little of the wisdom that comes with face-to-face encounters.

Our new ways of communicating have an effect on every stage of romance, from searching for love to presenting ourselves when we are hopeful of finding it to the new complexities we encounter as we try to make it work. In this environment, we move from “Where are you?” (the technology-enhanced encounter) to “Who are you?” and then to “Wait, what just happened? Did I make you disappear?”

L
iam, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in New York, is trying to right-swipe his way to love on Tinder. Liam tells me, “I use Tinder when I'm bored.” Liam is good-looking, stylishly dressed. He says of Tinder, with a modest grin, “It's a game changer.” What he likes most is that he doesn't have to worry about witty pickup lines, because with Tinder, every encounter has already been put in a potentially romantic context. “For me,” he says, “the awkward part . . . is trying to convert a friendly conversation into a more romantic one. That job is done by the app.” He finds this almost magical.

For Liam, experiments with Tinder are only the beginning of how technology increases his romantic possibilities. Texting is at the heart of things. He tells me that on a Friday night in Manhattan, there is no need to have made firm plans. He'll text a few friends to find out where the parties are.

And then, you are, potentially, in several games. You know a few places to go, a few bars to go to, where to meet . . . and once you're at a party, you can avoid embarrassment by texting your interest to a girl with something flirty.

So I use that first text to get some signal of interest, and you should know whether this thing is worth being pursued. Or drop it. Remember . . . wherever you are, you always have Tinder and you can see all the other available people. . . . So you always know you have a lot of choices.

Technology encourages Liam to see his romantic life in terms of product placement. He is the product and he is direct marketing. You pass your photo through Photoshop and then others go photo shopping. But despite this ease of first contact, Liam does not have a girlfriend and is not optimistic about his prospects.

For a start, complications follow from the first thing Liam mentions as a
positive
aspect of dating technology: the feeling of
infinite choice.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the notion of the “
paradox of choice
.” While we think we would be happiest if we had more choices, constrained choice often leads to a more satisfied life. In the 1950s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon made a distinction between people who try to
maximize
and those who
satisfice
, a word he invented. A
maximizer
is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that every purchase or personal decision (including the decision about a mate) is the best that could be made. The only way maximizers can know this for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task that only becomes more daunting as the number of options increases.

The alternative is to be a
satisficer.
You can still have standards, but you are not haunted by the universe of possible choices. You are happy to take what is before you and make the most of it. Satisficers are, in general, happier because their life tasks are simpler. You are not obsessed
about finding the best house—you might take a house that is comfortable and available and make it into a home. You don't think about the
best
mate. You are attracted to someone and allow yourself to attach.

Enter social media. Enter Facebook. Enter Tinder. Enter the world where one can fantasize infinite and
knowable
choices.
We are all encouraged to develop the psychology of maximizers.
In the domain of dating, maximizing can make you very unhappy indeed. Of course, people were always able, in theory, to enter into this psychological state. But the Internet makes it seem a logical state of mind. As one college senior puts it: “When people are just a click away, it is tempting to never settle.”

The psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane independently concluded that in American society today, abundance of choice (and this would apply to choices in products, career paths, or people) often
leads to depression and feelings of loneliness
. Lane points out that Americans used to make their choices in communities, surrounded by the “givens” of family, neighborhood, and workplace. Now, if individuals achieve a sense of community, it is because they have actively cultivated and maintained these connections over a lifetime. It is
something they have committed to
.

In a classic study of the effects of choice, people were given either a small or large array of chocolates and then asked to rate how pleased they were with their selection. Those who had selected from a smaller array were
more satisfied with how the chocolates tasted
. So, the problem with infinite choice is that it makes us unhappy because we can't bring ourselves to make any choice, and no choice feels definitive.

Danny, thirty-two, lives in Chicago. He is a real estate investor, with money and appealing looks. He is convinced that technology has made it harder to commit. Here is how Danny states his choice problem, although of course he is talking about women, not chocolates.

I broke up with a girl, let's call her “Lakeshore Drive Girl” because we used to go for long walks by the water. I broke up just because I thought there was something better online and these other women were
starting to text me back and forth. . . . Lakeshore Drive Girl got on to me and dumped me. I don't know if going out with others, being tempted by those girls in the phone . . . I don't know if that was the right thing to do.

Danny says he was ready to commit to “Lakeshore Drive Girl.” He doesn't seem happy when he looks down at his phone and says, “I thought there was something better online.” He speaks with a certain nostalgia for the arranged marriage of his grandparents.

I hate to say it, but there must have been something to it. Their families knew they came from a similar background, with similar taste. Their families wanted the best for both of them. And they were both committed to making it work, so they took the time to get to know each other. . . . And then, they were all in and supported by their families. Everyone was going to help them if there was any problem. Now, you are on your own. And if someone finds a fault in you, you're off the list. Next.