Why small talk matters...

Small talk and why I think it matters.

Ahh small talk. We’ve all done it or endured it, and while some of us love it, others absolutely can’t stand it. Small talk, in a broad sense, is a type of conversation where the topics are not directly connected to either individual involved in the conversation (assuming it is just between two people). Examples of this might be discussing common topics, such as the weather, or asking how your day/weekend/holiday has been.

So in a dating context, why do we do it?

This is actually pretty simple. Small talk is an inoffensive, low risk means to open a conversation with someone you don’t actually know. It serves the purpose of opening discussion between people, and after establishing some common boundaries and expectations from the conversation, is the conduit to branch and diversity conversation topics into deeper and more meaningful topics.

This is particularly the case in dating when there is little to work with from a profile, both in photo or written bio. With no foundation, opener or topic to start a conversation, whoever messages first needs to start with something. The default point we all tend to fall to? Small talk!

You may have heard the idiom “you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk”, or some variation of it. This applies in every sense to conversation with a stranger, and even to conversation with acquaintances or friends. Next time you take or make a phone call to someone, listen to the little automatic bits of the conversation you go through. Chances are you’ll open with a variation of “Hello, how are you?”, followed by a brief chat about how the day is going or what they’ve been up to, even when the real purpose of the call is completely unrelated. Part of this is politeness through showing an interest in the other person and their well-being, and part of it is to set up the parameters of the actual conversation itself by assessing the emotional states of the person through their responses.

Why do some people hate small talk?

In dating, the conversational pattern can become quite repetitive, particularly in the case of poor quality conversations. By “poor quality”, this can entail (but isn’t restricted to) conversations where responses are slow, where questions are “blocked” by closed answers, or even where answers are ignored (if you’ve ever been “talked at”, rather than “talked to”, you’ll know how this feels). For people who have a high number of matches on the apps, they might have gone through the “hey, how are you?” conversation cycle dozens of times, and that repetition simply has become first boring, then irritating.

In some cases, some people just aren’t good with small talk topics. This can be for any number of reasons, from not wanting to discuss their personal lives with strangers, all the way to a deep seated belief that their lives are so boring that to talk about it would scare off any potential suitors.

So is small talk good, or bad?

It can be both. In reality, I believe it to be critical to establishing a conversation with someone, even if it can be a bit tiring in some ways… Because without it there is no means by which to establish the proper protocols when starting to chat. Without these, there is no easy way to establish boundaries, formality or any meaningful conversation, nor any way to determine whether the other person is even interested in chatting. It doesn’t take a great deal of effort and is by far the easiest part of any conversation with a stranger, so in many ways I actually quite like small talk. Unfortunately, I suspect I might well be in the minority with actually liking small talk.

I’ve seen comments to this effect on profile bios, usually in the form of “allergic to small talk” or “can’t stand small talk”. Fair enough, but as above with the idiom regarding crawling and walking, this leaves us with a bit of a problem. What on earth are we meant to talk about?

In nearly every case where I’ve encountered someone with this view on conversation and I’ve actually matched with them, I’m left with a pretty major blocker. There is no way to open a conversation with them. I actually can’t think of a case where they’ve started the conversation either, so the whole interaction is essentially dead on arrival.

It isn’t like we can simply launch into deep and meaningful topics, not without the conversation having all the subtlety and grace of a brick to the face. One example I can recall is where I matched with a woman who didn’t like small talk, but at least had left an opening topic on their profile: “Tell me something I might not know about Back To The Future”. Ok then! Back to the future is a trilogy I’m pretty strong on, including trivia and unusual facts… In I go with one of the more unusual facts about the series which I can’t actually remember anymore, and the response?

“I know that.”

You can imagine how the rest of that conversation went… I didn’t even bother pointing out it was her own opener question!

Branching out of small talk

As tiring as small talk can be, particularly if you get an endless stream of people asking about your day, it really is the gateway to more meaningful conversations. Give it a chance, and give the people asking a chance too… You need to learn to small talk before you can move on to bigger and deeper topics. If you find yourself giving single word answers, the conversation itself is as good as dead already. In these cases, you are probably best off assessing why you’re giving that type of answer in the first place rather than simply wishing for better conversations, because you might well be the reason!

My recommendation for getting there would be to try and respond with a question in turn, particularly once the initial pleasantries have been exchanged.

If they’ve asked how your day was, respond in turn with a question about their day, or ask them how they feel about the current weather. So long as their responses are more detailed than “good” or “not bad” it should provide an opening to branch the topic into something deeper, such as what they do for work, whether they like hot weather or cold weather (and whether they like travelling to places with similar weather!) or how they feel about various adjacent topics that connect to all of the random things that happen to us in our daily lives.

If nothing else, ask about particular photos or prompts on their profile, or what they like to do for their hobbies and see where those particular conversations go.