There was a period in my life when I equated small talk with tedium. I don’t think I had a problem with it prior to that or found it so distasteful that I took active measures to avoid it. The feeling stole upon me unawares.

During that time, I found the pleasantries and customs of introductory and preliminary conversation at social, formal and family engagements, particularly onerous and boring. There is only so far we can go with the weather, traffic, or poor mobile network. We will not get far over topics of no real interest to us.

At some point, the conversation devolves into a mutual, polite ignorance of each other with the occasional smile when our eyes happen to align despite our best efforts to avoid that. Or we plod on with conversation we both feel obliged to keep going.

I wanted to slice through the thicket of small talk as quickly as possible. Within a handful of minutes, I wanted to be at the glowing core or the quitest corner of your soul. I wanted my ear pressed against your beating heart (metaphorically, of course) listening to each beat. I wanted to comprehend and empathise with your aspirations, fears, hates, loves, obsessions, perversions, whatever, so long as it came from the depth of your being and wasn’t ‘superficial’. I wanted our conversation to be deep, intimate and meaningful.

And I wanted to that quality of conversations within five minutes of having met you. It was unreasonable, absurd and impossible, but because of those very qualities, it appealed to me.

Over time, my desperation to escape small talk saw me draw up and constantly refine a list of questions. The purpose of the questions was to quickly guide a conversation into a deeper and more intimate phase. In drawing up the list of questions, I drew heavily on both my reflection and reading, which was focused on understanding how people behave over a variety of domains. With each conversation, with each person, I recasted, removed, added, revised or reordered the questions until I reached a certain optimality and predictability with them.

The questions were not complicated. They can be asked with simple language. I saw them as emphatic prompters than questions. The list of questions wasn’t long. I had no more than six or seven questions on the list. Even though they were listed in some sequence, they were not meant to be asked in sequence. They were to be applied when appropriate to steer the conversation.

The questions were designed and honed to move us past small talk and straight into deep talk. They were closer to conversation markers than actual questions. That means although those questions were important and significant in driving the conversation, the questions alone and their mere asking were insufficient.

The questions had to be deployed together with great nuance, tact, sensitivity and empathy in a conversational cocoon of genuine interest and close listening. By listening, I mean listening to the other person like there is no one else in world. For that moment, the universe outside our conversation is suspended and all there is is just you and me left in this world. And we are having this conversation.

When the questions I crafted were paired with an attitude of deep, active and sensitive listening, a confidential environment, the appropriate conversation prompts and takes place within a cocoon of genuine interest and close listening, it encourages the other person to speak more genuinely, more deeply and more thoughtfully about not themselves, but also how they see the world. It creates conditions for a confessional, without the anonymizing barrier.

If and when I deployed the questions in the way above, I would quickly end up listening to personal and intimate confessions by the person I was speaking to. Often, within the first hour of our meeting, they would tell me about their love lives, sex lives, affairs, marriages, divorces, their failures, their dreams, their hopes, and their worries about their children.

At some point in the conversation, a realization would dawn on them and they would remark, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I am telling you all this after just meeting you. I am not even sure why I am telling you all this. But anyway, and then…’ And continue on.

Now, having said that, it was not a full proof method. Sometimes it work, sometimes it didn’t. But it seemed to work more often than not when properly carried out with the right conditions. It did not work in every situation. It worked best with people I did not know or know superficially. If someone was wary of me, was the guarded sort or didn’t like me then it was less likely to happen.

But after gaining some competency in deploying the questions I crafted, as much as I enjoyed being allowed for a moment into the intimate lives of others, I realized a serious downside to it.

In my experience, a person who goes into confessional mode tend to go on a fair bit and want to tell us the rest of their personal history. Which is fine. When we connect with someone, we feel we can’t get enough and try to prolong the moment. When we feel comfortable telling something confidential or personal, we want to share the rest of it with them. I totally get it.

But that takes time. Serious time. And I am always short of time. As I result, I would often find myself caged in conversation way longer than I had scheduled or expected to be detained. I find great difficulty in cutting someone off when we are in a middle of an intimate moment. The half hour I budgeted easily transformed into a three hour epic.

And close and active listening takes up significant emotional and psychological energy too. So after a session, I feel harried because I have to catch up with my work and assignments and yet am emotionally depleted by the experience.

There have been enough times where I too start asking myself, ‘Why on earth have I been sitting here for the last two and half hours listening to the gory details of X’s relationship with his girlfriend when he has three wives to boot?’ For example.

In my bid to escape a few minutes of small talk, I ended up being caged in hours of deep talk that sometimes left me exhausted. I could not keep doing this with someone new. It was far too taxing. It was at this point that I appreciated small talk and found relief in it.

Since then, I have come to appreciate not every conversation needs to be this deep communion between us. Small talk allows us to explore common grounds of interest and manage how personal or intimate we want to be with each other. We do not need a deep level of intimacy or relationship with each and every person. It is impossible. And not everyone is deserving of such a connection or relationship. Because that takes time. And we should spend our time on the deserving.

More importantly, small talk allows for talk cock (the Malaysian term for frivolous, speculative, mischevious and naughty conversation). Small talk gives us the opportunity to gradually and gently acquaint ourselves with the other. Small talk also has more possibilities for laughter, frivolity and pleasure. Deep and intimate talk is often sober, serious and important. Small talk allows us to contain and extricate ourselves from a conversation far more easily.

I have also come to appreciate that with relationships, there is no rush and nothing about it should be accelerated or expedited. Relationships, like all things worthwhile, take time, and should grow like plants, organically. The things that are worthwhile takes time, not speed.

The most appropriate approach for myself now is not to draw too hard a distinction between the various modes of conversations, but to find pleasure and learning in them all. Because in life, we need small talk as much as we need deep talk and all the various modes of talk.

When I reflect on my previous attitude towards small talk, I realize we should not always try to escape what we don’t like or think we don’t like. We should instead try to deepen our impression of it to appreciate and find the good in it or something to enjoy about it. Escaping removes us from where we are but it may not place us where we want to be, or in a better place.

As for my list of questions, I have since lost the scrap of paper I wrote it on and have forgotten them. It is just as well. Sometimes, the better solution is to appreciate, not escape.