Comfortable silence and companionships
Comfortable silence and companionships
Friends are not the ones with whom we share everything, rather they are the ones with whom we can share comfortable silence.
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My views and belief about companionships have evolved over time.
As a child (or until very recently), I had a firm conviction that friends and companions are the ones with whom you share everything. When adolescence hit, this conviction only grew stronger. You experience many physical and emotional changes. And often, you will find a companion (in school or at tuition) to share everything you may be going through.
While there is nothing wrong with that and I am sure even in our adulthood we share a lot of stuff that is going on with our companions. But I think the essence of a companion is not in sharing every nitty-gritty detail of life, but rather in sharing comfortable silences.
This realization struck me after some recent interactions I had, especially in the workplace. In the office, you typically bump into three types of people based on the level of interaction and familiarity: The 1st one is probably your team members. You’re quite comfortable with them. Often you crack jokes and chat casually. The 2nd kind are the ones you have seen in the office but don’t know their names and you have never spoken to them. So no social obligation whatsoever. Now here comes the 3rd and most challenging kind. They sit between the 1st and 2nd. You know the name of these people, you might have collaborated with them for some project but there is hardly any bond. These people are difficult to talk to. And often you make small talk to avoid the uneasy silence.
My worst small-talk experience was when a candidate came in for a face-to-face interview with my manager and a few other people. I had earlier spoken to this guy in one round. My manager wanted me to mingle with him and “just talk” for some time being as he had some urgent work. That was the longest 20 mins of my life. I learned what uncomfortable silence was.
And as luck would have it, I would soon experience comfortable silences on multiple occasions.
I was visiting a friend in a different city. We went out to eat and took the metro. Throughout the journey, I remember, we barely talked. And the great thing was that we didn’t feel the pressure to talk to each other at all. Both of us were very content in our own skin. A similar thing happened when a friend of mine came to stay with me for a week. We would be in a room, gossip for an hour, and then would go back to not talking at all.
This also happens a lot with married couples, I think. I remember one of my peers said this about his grandparents who are in their late 80s: “They hardly talk to each other, except when they’re at the dinner table. What a marriage of 60 years does to you!”
At that time, when he had said this, I didn’t have this realisation of comfortable silence. But now, to think about it, his grandparents are merely engaging in this act of sharing comfortable silences. That is something one should be dreaming to do with one’s companion too.
After all, your spouse is supposed to be your companion only, right?