Nurse Patience has a little wisdom to share, acquired through years of questionable nights out, respectable employment and conversations that should have ended forty minutes earlier.
These are personal opinions, naturally, although I am happy to accept applause from anyone who recognises the problem. Having spent a generous portion of my youth enjoying people, I now believe that some of them would benefit enormously from being introduced to a chicken.
A Former Enthusiast of People
There was a time when I could be persuaded to go out with approximately four seconds’ notice. Parties, dinners, drinks that turned into dancing and dancing that turned into breakfast. I had some excellent years, made some questionable decisions and acquired stories that will remain classified until my children are old enough to stop using them against me.
I liked people. Some evenings I even liked all of them.
Then children happened, and life arrived at 5:47 a.m. demanding a banana, rejecting it for being “too banana” and requesting an explanation for why the sun exists.
I adore my children, and I have a wonderful husband who is my partner in this magnificent operation. Between us, we can organise an evening out with only a few months’ preparation, several diary consultations and the quiet understanding that somebody will develop fever fifteen minutes before we leave.
By the time I arrive, I have arranged childcare, completed a handover and found clothes that suggest I have interests beyond locating missing socks. I have made an effort.
There is also something rather clarifying about having less time. When your evenings are no longer an endless stretch of possibility, you become more particular about how you spend them. You start to notice the difference between people you want to see and people you feel you ought to see, which is an uncomfortable distinction if you have spent years treating the two as interchangeable.
I used to think a full social calendar was a sign that life was going rather well. Now I suspect it may simply be evidence of an efficient way of colouring time blocks. The quality of the company, unfortunately, does not appear anywhere on the booking confirmation.
So when someone asks what I do and starts looking over my shoulder halfway through the answer, I am perfectly happy to stop talking and let them get on with their search for a more profitable human.
Authenticity: Subject to Commercial Interest
Networking events are particularly entertaining because everyone is so passionate about “authentic connection”, right up until they discover you cannot introduce them to an investor. Then their authenticity needs the toilet.
Social gatherings offer much the same performance, with better lighting.
You ask someone about their work, their family and their holiday, and forty minutes later you know their kitchen dimensions, their preferred airline and their opinions on people who do not invest in property. They know nothing about you, but apparently the two of you have really hit it off. I could have sent a cardboard cutout with a glass of wine taped to it and enjoyed the evening at home.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that being sociable was a virtue in itself. We should network, reconnect, show up, keep in touch, expand our circles and remain open to opportunities. Every encounter is apparently capable of becoming a friendship, a business partnership or at least a useful contact for something that has not happened yet.
I find this exhausting in the way only a perfectly respectable idea can be exhausting. Of course, people need people. Of course, good things happen when we leave the house and talk to strangers. But surely we are allowed to distinguish between being open to the world and treating every invitation as a compulsory audition.
I have become quite selective about this sort of thing. If I wanted to spend an evening applauding someone for talking exclusively about themselves, I could stay home with my children. At least their stories occasionally involve a dragon.
The Art of Being Interesting
Curiosity is one of the most attractive qualities a person can have. Not the sort that collects information to use later, or asks questions while mentally preparing the next funny thing to say, but the kind that genuinely wants to know what someone thinks.
It is a rare pleasure to meet a person who can leave a little room in a conversation for something unexpected to happen.
I should probably clarify that I am not expecting every conversation to change my life. I am perfectly capable of enjoying a discussion about the weather, a badly behaved dog or somebody's disastrous attempt to assemble flat-pack furniture. Not every interaction needs depth, and not every person we meet needs to become a friend.
What I struggle with is the absence of reciprocity, that peculiar arrangement in which one person provides the audience and the other provides the entire production. There is a difference between a conversation that goes nowhere in particular and one that never had any intention of going anywhere except back to the person speaking.
What I enjoy is someone with enough curiosity to ask a question and enough confidence to listen to the answer. Someone who can laugh at themselves, remember what you said and have a conversation without checking whether a better offer has entered the room. Those people are excellent company, and I will happily put on proper shoes for them.
The others are making a remarkably strong case for my retirement to the countryside, where I intend to look after chickens and become difficult to reach. My husband is wonderful, my children are hilarious, and I have a handful of people whose company I actively look forward to. The rest will have to compete with a comfortable chair and the possibility of acquiring a hen called Barbara.
Barbara may be noisy, demanding and interested mainly in what I can give her, but she will never describe our relationship as a strategic opportunity. That already puts her ahead of several people I have met this year.
There is something reassuring about a relationship in which nobody is trying to optimise the outcome. Barbara will not broaden my network, introduce me to influential people or help me develop my brand. She may, however, produce an egg. At this stage of my life, I am prepared to consider that a meaningful contribution.
The point is not to want less human connection. It is to stop treating all human connection as equally valuable. There is a certain freedom in discovering that you do not need a large circle, a busy calendar or a fresh collection of acquaintances to feel that your life is full.