Something About What Happens When We Talk

“We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about,” Jennifer Coolidge’s character says of conversation with her husband in Best in Show, and that is how I feel about most people.

As a teen, my parents and brother often chided me for my (excessive, in their view) introversion and lack of social skills. “Socially retarded” was their pronouncement of choice, and a younger sibling later mixed things up by calling me “a stupid autistic fuck who doesn’t understand anything.” (My best friend affectionately repeats that one every so often, to keep its memory alive.) I knew there was more than a morsel of truth to their criticism that I was socially inept, irrespective of their callous phrasing, and overcoming those deficits — or at least mitigating them — became a more urgent matter once I fell in love with someone I didn’t want to accidentally hurt or embarrass.

In my mid-to-late twenties I resolved to sharpen my small talk and eye contact skills, figuring that was as good a place to start as any. I did some of it by accepting secret shopper assignments in exchange for extra income — jobs that required you to feign interest in a refrigerator at Lowe’s or a new television at Best Buy, or to call a flooring company with questions about a product. And some of it I gradually built a tolerance for by pretending to care what acquaintances thought about the weather or the Super Bowl.

By my thirties I could pass as relatively normal around Crankenstein’s friends and colleagues, assisted in some cases by their own fundamental weirdness. The air is thick with autism at med school faculty parties, particularly those frequented by physician-scientists who collect Ivy League degrees like loose change, making me feel right at home. But Crankenstein’s a Renaissance woman who runs with many crowds, including sensitive poets and visual artists, and I’m equally or more comfortable around them, even if I’m unlikely to collect MacArthur or NEA grants for my accomplishments in the underappreciated medium of Bea Arthur memes.

I am proud of the work I’ve done to enjoy easier face-to-face interactions with friends, family and strangers alike, and regret not pursuing it sooner. Despite this progress, I have limitations like anyone else. In fact, in my 40 years on this planet I’ve met precisely three people I never tired of talking to, including my best friend and Crankenstein.

For almost a quarter-century my best friend and I have been immersed in an unending (if occasionally interrupted) conversation about Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, literature, comedy, death, sex, history, politics and tennis. We met in our teens and early twenties; that I’ll be 45 and he’ll be 50 in just a few short years makes my head spin. We could talk for another hundred years and still have so much left to say. When I think about one of us predeceasing the other, I can’t imagine not being able to discuss it with him afterward. And so I toy with the idea, if I know I’m going first, of scheduling emails to be delivered posthumously, with subject lines like “Death is overrated.”

On my first date with Crankenstein, we planned something that would be easy to end in case there was no spark. Instead we talked for hours — and we were just warming up. She doesn’t only enliven our conversations with her uncanny ability to produce the perfect Arrested Development quote for every occasion, or make me groan with her voracious appetite for puns. She’s an extraordinarily thoughtful listener who never misses a nuance* or, just as importantly, an opportunity for morbid humor. We can discuss nearly anything, no matter how deep, dark or depraved, and I know she’ll pick up on something interesting that illuminates an unexpected truth or beauty. Even if the topic is soup or snow peas.

It wasn’t until I met Crankenstein that I realized the monumental silliness of the self-described “empaths” I’ve known throughout the years. Without exception they are women (and the occasional gay man) whose emotional identities are predicated on the falsehood that they’re unerringly correct in intuiting other peoples’ feelings and motivations. I agree with their premise that traumatic childhoods forge lasting emotional vigilance — the majority of empaths cite difficult childhoods as the source of their powers — but none of that equates to impeccable instincts. Often these are fundamentally distrusting types who view everyone around them through the same jaundiced eye, which is the opposite of empathy.

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