The kind where if you have to be around people you feel more comfortable in a group than with just one other person?
I get nervous around "dead air" if I'm with people so if I'm the only other person I feel pressure to be interesting and it's exhausting. If there's a group of people it's not so bad because it divides the responsibility of being entertaining around all of us so I don't have to worry if I'm boring. I can just chill and let other people talk.
Plus I find I'm better at bouncing off of others than initiating conversation.
Totally, I find that physical exercise helps me deal with it, especially, weirdly, kickboxing. I feel there's a parallel between learning to be comfortable in the tense dead air between blows, and learning to be comfortable in the tense dead air between words
Performing arts do the same thing. Silence is a part of a change in mood and conversation, nobody can effectively make a choice on stage without experiencing it. Sometimes it's for less than a second, sometimes it lasts minutes but it always preceedes anything important. In music there is something similar where musicians will try to be loud, everything always loud all the time, but what was meant to be epic music becomes a drone of indecision.
Some people really struggle with putting their mark on a situation. There is a timidity that most people have that must be beaten out of you before entering the ring, or stepping onto a stage. It's so helpful and freeing once you finally get it.
Damn, that's an entire dimension and perspective I hadn't really considered. I've made the connection to dancing in other ways, but didn't think about the implications of both being forms of expression
I think finding a place of comfortable silence is one of the nicest things about having a love affair but its also not an unreasonable expectation of your close friends, who I feel should not expect constant entertainment from you. But yeah it is a constant struggle against that dynamic in uncertain social circumstances, 1-on-1 can be a nightmare
:yea:
How do people have one on one conversations without running out of things to talk about
How do you run out of things to talk about? You don't have a mental encyclopedia of weird animal facts to fall back on like how penguins practice prostitution for the shiny stones they use to make their nests?
I could talk about how there's a species of jumping spider than spends hours planning their ambushes, even going well out of line of sight of their prey, because they hunt other jumping spiders and evolved to outsmart them, or the fun fact that there is a very very low but non-zero chance that someone peeing in a swimming pool can cause an explosion, but people usually don't take to those
there is a very very low but non-zero chance that someone peeing in a swimming pool
Please elaborate on this.
Exaggerating a bit but basically an oxidizing source of chlorine (pool chemical, specifically the one that makes your eyes red) and a source of nitrogen (urine) could make nitrogen trichloride, an incredibly sensitive explosive. Incredibly unlikely to happen because A: it's incredibly sensitive, so much so that a slight change in the amount of light can set it off and it would probably react at incredibly small and unnoticeable amounts B: you'd need to get a really high concentration for it to cause anything significant C: the reaction has to happen in the first place, and there's lots of other things in pools that those ingredients could bond with instead
I'd put the odds of it happening at higher than splitting an atom accidentally while biting into a sandwich, but probably lower than thoroughly shuffling a deck of cards and them being in the same order as pre-shuffle
For the record, I'm not a chemist, this is 3 am YouTube rabbit hole info from watching haha funny Aussie man make it. Also obligatory "don't try this at home" for obvious reasons since looking at it weird can cause it to go boom
or the fun fact that there is a very very low but non-zero chance that someone peeing in a swimming pool can cause an explosion
:wholesome: thank god they put this chemical in the water that turns red when somebody pees in there
It's just something you learn to get better at, tbh. I had a pretty lonely childhood with extremely inattentive parents, but post uni, customer service jobs, and other stuff I've become a decent conversationalist. Practice makes perfect comrade!
I'm most comfortable in a group of 3-4, yeah.
Shit, it's been half a year and I still haven't made good on my new year's resolution to come out as polyamorous.
As a third wheel I often do a lot of negative ruminating, but it's not all bad...definitely better than the excruciating feeling when the conversation completely dies and the other person slowly pulls out their phone. This happened to me twice on the same day recently, good times.
I think what's so frustrating about it is that I used to be able to hold decent conversations with most people. I was never a silver-tongued devil, but I could hold down decent conversations with most people and endless conversations with closer friends and family. Now the only people I feel like I can have a good conversation with are my dad and my therapist. I remember spending hours and hours bullshitting with one friend or another...now I dread the inevitable awkward silence if we have to be in the car alone for even 5 minutes.
