Say less

Talking about my efforts to be quiet, lol

I’m trying to be quieter lately. I’m trying so hard that I looked into silent retreats, but then I got worried the food would be bad and decided to be quiet at home.

It all started with the latest season of Couples Therapy, and specifically Rod and Alison. It seems like they’re doing well now, and still together! But at time of filming, Alison COULD not stop talking.

It sounds misogynistic and perhaps is, but if you watch the two of them in action you’ll see what I mean. She will interrupt anyone! She NEEEEDS to be HEARDDD. She is disappointed and she doesn’t know why and the time to discuss that is FOREVER NOW!

“If you want Rod to talk to you more, you need to make the conversations inviting,” Orna Guralnik, the docuseries’ titular couples therapist, tells Alison in this clip.

My more practical thought there is: “If you want Rod to talk to you more, when would he do that exactly?”

It’s not just Alison creating the forever-speaker-and-forever-listener dynamic—Rod loves to be a silent sounding board, for his own matrix of personal reasons—but of the two of them, Alison is the one I relate to more. I am, after all, Mae Rice of the Mae Rice Culture of Talking. So ever since watching the show, a thought bubble has been hovering over my head: What if I shut up more?

Here are some types of talking I’m trying to cut back on:

• Talking when someone else is talking: Not that I do a ton of this.

• Talking RIGHT after someone else was talking: Maybe they’re not done! I interview people for work, and if I let a silence sit for a few seconds, a source will often continue their thought in an interesting way.

• Talking about a forthcoming action: Why say “I’m about to do this!” when I could say “I did this!” (or at least “I started to do this!” if it’s like, buying a house, running a marathon, etc.). It’s more interesting to discuss real things. It’s also a great way to avoid feeling or looking like I have weak follow-through—I’m saying fewer future-tense things about myself!

• Defending a decision: Continuing to discuss a choice after it’s made suggests it’s still up for discussion. Silence says it’s not. This is primarily about telling guys from Hinge we’re not going on a third date. We aren’t!

• Talking about distrust: “I think you might not be telling the truth” is sort of a useless thing to say, no matter how you (I) phrase it—it just makes the other person feel upset, and encourages them to say defensive new things that also don’t feel trustworthy either. It’s like saying, “Let’s have a tense and unproductive conversation!” So I’m trying to address distrust more by… holding the uncertainty quietly in my brain? Not betting a lot of money or time on sus claims? Idk. But trust is a prerequisite for good talking.

• Talking with baseless urgency: I almost never need to say something RIGHT AWAY, but I often think I do, because I have a baseline high sense of urgency about all tasks. (I recently realized most people start work projects X days before they’re due, hence the institution of “due dates,” whereas I have been starting projects the moment I’m free. This means I have been doing tons of work no one needs in the end, all while feeling VERY virtuous, lol.) When I respond to texts or Slacks or even big verbal questions right away, I am less likely to be fully grasping the situation or telegraphing… calm. Trying to slow that down.

• Talking to convince myself something is real: When something unusual happens to me — good or bad! But mostly bad — I often recount it to someone else immediately, to convince myself that it happened. And like yeah, if I get hit by a car, you bet your ass I am recounting that to everyone I know, probably multiple times per person, to bring out all the different themes and motifs. But not every experience is worth recounting; it can veer into the same territory The Rehearsal, just with the repetition on the backend of the event. I can trust my own eyeballs more and move a little quicker through life.

• Indecisive talking: Talking about how I’m not sure what to do about X just postpones the decision. Sometimes I get feedback when I do this, but a lot of times it’s kind of bad feedback from someone with incomplete information who I have roped into my inner life for no reason. I can just decide!

• Giving other people directions: I don’t give other people a lot of ORDERS, but I’ve realized that by asking questions, I still exert a type of control over conversations. A question is sort of an order in disguise: “Fill in this blank next.” I am never going to stop asking questions (I can’t emphasize enough that I interview people for work), but I am also trying to imagine new ways to create “open play situations,” like Myst, for people I’m talking to.

My goal in being more quiet isn’t to be a “quiet woman,” which will never happen for me, realistically. I’m more trying to be in a solid, ongoing conversation with the world. I want to say and do stuff, and see how the world responds, and learn from that… sort of a basic feedback loop, idk if I needed to elaborate on that lol. (Another non-ideal type of talking: overexplaining!) But for the conversation with the world to happen, I have to be quiet and listen sometimes. Otherwise I’m just living in a Truman Show world made out of my thoughts!

Reader qs

When are you being quiet? AND if you watched the new Couples Therapy season, how did it affect you?

Linxxx

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