The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense With Someone We Love

We might expect that, if we could eavesdrop on the conversations of the most admirable, clever and loving couples in the world, those who had properly cracked the puzzles of intimacy and emotional maturity, we would hear them talking in the noblest ways about the most serious things. 

On any given evening, they might be found discussing the connections between attachment theory and their early bonds with their parents, they might read a paper together by Melanie Klein or they might relax by watching an early film by Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon or Sanshiro Sugata). So it may come as a surprise that in all likelihood, these couples would do nothing of the sort. Through our recording equipment, we might hear some of the following: one of them starting to wonder why bananas grow in an oblong curved shape, the other – not quite listening – going off on a tangent about an ulcer they’ve got on the left side of their tongue while filing a toenail and half glancing at an airline review video on YouTube, which might be followed by the other speculating (for no apparent reason, in a bad imitation of a German accent) on the lyrics in an album by Dire Straits, which might be a prelude to their partner suggesting that they wanted to follow up on last night’s reheated curry with a chocolate biscuit dipped in strawberry yoghurt. 

It might sound like regressive nonsense and in key ways it is, but we might want to maintain that this sort of incoherent chatter should also be considered one of the high-water marks of emotional intimacy and in its way, a bellwether of the most serious kinds of interpersonal closeness. People who know each other extremely well and love one another deeply, do not – it appears – sit together discussing philosophy or the accelerator theory in economics, they shoot the breeze, they swerve here and there, they talk shit and this, far from being some kind of distraction or unfortunate lapse, is a strange and profound proof of the depths of their mutual affection. Intimacy is about daring to be increasingly and bravely weird with someone else – and finding out that that’s OK with them.

In the recesses of all of our minds flows a stream of consciousness that mixes the serious and the unserious, the consequential and the flighty, the physical and the emotional. And when we have allowed ourselves to be genuinely close to someone, it is to this that we take them; we do them the honour of showing them who we actually are, not who we should or pretend to be – a privilege we grant only to a handful of people in our lives. Everyone else may know our sensible selves; they’ve been introduced to, and know how to love and take an interest in a naughty sweet curious and highly peculiar babbling child.

When we talk about nothing in particular we’re doing something even more significant than when we attempt to say rational and logical things: we are allowing someone into the primordial parts of ourselves that the rules of society otherwise censor. We are doing one of the most courageous and important things in the world: allowing someone else to know us.