The Sun-Herald

Silence is golden

I attended two large fashion shows this week, and although many who shared this experience moaned about sitting still and watching frocks for so long, I enjoyed not speaking to anyone for a while.

These days, no-one ever stops talking. One of my friends who saw the shows too noted that he'd had "about 243 small conversations," at the after-parties, of which, he added ruefully, he can recall only three in their entirety.
That's what you do at parties, of course - bounce from one exchange to the next like those little balls over the words on karoake screen lyrics - but sometimes it seems our entire lives are conducted over a hubbub of chatter.
Even when we're not speaking with our mouths, we're doing it with our fingers. Most of the people swapping face time at those parties were Facebooking each other just hours before. We are such inveterate, profligate communicators that I fear we no longer relish silence.
Just look at the relationship industry's obsession with "good communication." All the experts want us to talk until we're blue in the face. Here on my shelves are endless books about speaking, all encouraging men and women to babble on at each other as much as possible and chastising us for not. There are ones about talking each other's language, talking styles, talking before and after sex, what we really mean when we talk, what we should ask each other while we're talking. There's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (obvious!) and How to Talk so Men Will Listen (loudly?). Nothing, though, telling you how to achieve shared silence, which can be a truly wonderful thing. The advice industry, like nature, abhors a vaccum.
When I was younger and measured the quality of my relationships by such barometers, I was alarmed by a women's magazine advice column that warned about a condition called 'SDS' - Silent Dining Syndrome. It said that if you didn't speak to each other constantly while dining out, you were growing apart. Like a televised football game, every meal should be accompanied by an uninterrupted stream of chatter. Silence, said the expert, was a Bad Sign and I worried terribly that my boyfriend and I didn't have enough to say to each other (as it happened we did, but none of it was very nice so we broke up).
I've always considered the opposite true. When the pair of you can sit together in content, companionable silence without feeling compelled to fill the gaps with noise the way broadcasters fill dead air, I reckon you're in harmony.
Of course not all silence is harmless and I say this with some authority, as we English are world champions at the repressed, loaded sort. (Anyone who's watched The Remains of the Day will know what I mean.) I once locked elbows for an hour with a stranger in a ferocious battle for the armrest between our seats on a packed London tube train. So hard did we push and shove for this little piece of prime real estate that when I finally stood up, removing the resistance, the man collapsed sideways. But we never exchanged a word.
I know couples who excel at that seething silence. It's as if their mutual rage has grown too monstrous to be contained by words and instead, they transmit it with toxic stares - communication chemical warfare.
Still, genuinely good communication has nothing to do with how much racket you make. I have a verbose friend with 100 colourful ways to convey her man's uselessness, and none to explain why she's with him. A male friend can argue a point of domestic contention with his wife as eloquently as the QC he is, then forget to tell her he's off to Singapore tomorrow.
And there's that perfidious breed of emotional terrorist I call Truth Abusers - monsters created by our modern obsession with full and frank disclosure. Their trademark prefaces - "do you mind if I speak frankly?', "I call it like it is," and "I'm telling you as a friend," - are modern speak for: "I am about to insult/upset/embarrass you with my weapons of choice: brutal honesty and bad timing." These are the people who will tell you, while your heartbreak is raw, that your ex never loved you anyway. Or that you're going bald, or putting on weight. They hit you with reality when you're down.
I feel for men in today's communication-crazed society. They do stillness and silence so much better than women and yet we're always badgering them to talk more. So much of the advice literature adopts the breathtakingly patronizing assumption that men can't talk without help and we must tutor them gently, like children. "Don't overwhelm your partner," says one. "Slow down ... be clear about what you want to say. If you were speaking English to someone from another country you'd talk very slowly and clearly, wouldn't you?" I have dog handling manuals that credit their subject with more intelligence.
Besides, some of my closest friends are not only men but non-native English speakers too. We manage just fine when the words dry up; once we've said everything we need to, we punctuate our silences with something far better than white noise: laughter. That's a language anyone can share.