Ideal Questions to Ask at Parties

There are – let’s suggest – very few truly boring people on earth, but a great many who end up seeming as much for a simple, touching and highly avoidable reason: because they are asking one another the wrong questions.

They end up – through an entirely understandable wish not to seem unusual or cause offence –  enmeshed in conversations about commuting times, a scandal in parliament, the antics of a friend of a friend or plans for the upcoming holidays. No one wants this in the brief lives we have been allotted, given all that we ache with inside, given how much we yearn to find an echo of our sorrows and longings in others but it can seem impossible not to end up here. A species that knows how to train geophysicists and neurosurgeons, that builds institutions to teach biology and algebra, Finnish and Mediaeval history, that writes operating manuals for submarines and food processors blithely neglects any role for education, explanation or ritual around the art of conversation. 

Let’s therefore imagine an ideal evening, on the edge of a weekend, in a comfortable setting, with a genial host and a handful of guests around a table. Each person would be invited to draw from a deck of cards in the centre – and answer the question printed on it with unusual sincerity. These are the topics we might, if we could only surrender our fears, love to speak and hear more about:

– In what ways are you a bit unreasonable?

– What do you hope you could be forgiven for?

– If you could change something about your childhood, what would it be?

– How can you be tricky in relationships?

– What’s an anxiety that other people might not necessarily expect you to have?

– What do you dislike about yourself?

– What are your weaknesses around work?

– What parts of your personality might be defences against early pain?

– What do you wish you could ask for more directly in love?

– What’s most admirable about you?

– What do you wish you could change about yourself?

– How have you upset people without meaning to?

– What failings of character might you normally be a bit reluctant to admit to others?

– What are you afraid others may assume about you?

We may ultimately face a choice: between dignity on the one hand, loneliness on the other. What we have to lose in terms of impressiveness, we may gain in terms of humanity. If we answer such questions candidly, we will no longer seem like the impregnable, confident, knowledgeable people we normally strive to be. We’ll have mentioned the break-up, the anxiety that never leaves us alone, the sense of ineptness that pursues us in professional life. We may have hesitated while our eyes filled with tears. But we’ll emerge as something even more impressive than impregnable: people strong enough to share their wounds, serious enough to laugh at themselves, sane enough to be weird and so ready – at last – for true friendship.