what people say

I often wonder what other couples talk about when they are alone. Seppo and I have a lot of car conversations, as we carpool to work together nearly everyday. We discuss random things such as:

• If one of our straight friends came out, who would you be the most surprised about? The least surprised about?
• What is the first frivolous thing you would buy if you won the lottery?
• If you were to mix-and-match all of our friends into different couples, who would you match up?
• If you were to start up a band, who among our friends would you put in the band?
• Who do you think looks the oldest of our friends? The youngest?
• Who of our friends would you trust the most in a survival situation?
• How many cars in the Bay Area do you think have both a Bush/Cheney ’04 bumpersticker AND a rainbow one?
• Do you think there is a higher probability of people dying on or near their birthdays than on a random other day (not counting major holidays)?
• What will the new wave of energy production be in the future?
• What are the most interesting uses of flexible display technology?
• If you were to make a movie and you wanted someone to provide the score for it, who would it be?
• What do you think explains our respective self-esteem levels when we were going up?
• If you were to mix-and-match our friends into other friends’ bodies, who would you put in whose body and why?

We do a lot of these. I think this started back when we were doing the long-distance thing while I was in Boston and he was in LA, then we continued it when he was in Oakland and I was in San Jose. It’s fun, provides a lot of insight into the other person’s mindset, and makes sure that phone conversations are not stilted and boring, which is one of the worst thing that can happen to a long-distance relationship, not to mention the easiest. These conversations, which often seem random and irrelavant to real life, often lead into interesting discussions about things that affect us in a practical level.

I often overhear other couples talking at restaurants and think to myself how I would have to throttle someone if I had to have conversation as inane as they did.