The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense with Someone We Love

we might expect that if we could EES drop on the conversations of the most admirable clever and loving couples in the world those who'd 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 pap put together by Melanie Klein or they might relax by watching an early film by Akira kurasawa Rashon or sanira 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 Dia 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 yogurt 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 bellweather 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 and economics they shoot the breeze they swerve here and there they talk 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 okay 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've allowed

ourselves to be genuinely close to someone it is to this that we take them we do them the honor of showing them who we actually are not who 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're allowing someone into the primordial parts of ourselves that the rules of society otherwise censor we're doing one of the most courageous and important things in the world allowing someone else to know us