Cocktails, Commitments, and
Crafting Conversation
Mr. Ben Christenson
Modern meals, even at restaurants, can be a sad sight. The young kids tap their rubber-encased tablets while the tweens hold their phones under the table and the parents awkwardly attempt to interact or just pull out their own phones in resignation. (In some cases, the parents are the first and worst offenders). Few families spend their time at restaurants actually conversing with the people in front of them. We feed our bodies, but we starve our relationships.
It’s the same with interactions at home, school, work — pretty much everywhere. We know we shouldn’t do it, but we do. Indeed, a recent Pew survey found that eighty-two percent of adults believe that when people use their phones in social gatherings, it frequently or occasionally hurts the conversation. Yet in spite of this, eighty-nine percent of the adults surveyed acknowledged that they themselves had used their phone during their most recent social gathering.
This sense that phones inhibit intimacy was supported by a study at the University of Essex in the U.K., which asked participants to pair off and converse privately for ten minutes. Half the group had phones in the room, and the other half did not. Participants with phones present reported lower levels of empathy, trust, and closeness, with the effect most pronounced when a personally meaningful topic was being discussed. The message of a phone on the table is clear: “I may need to take this soon. My attention to you is contingent.”
It’s hard to make a friend or meet a mate when every free moment is absorbed by phones, and this especially hits those who lack a pre-digital social network. In one survey, twenty-five percent of adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven reported having no close friends, while twenty-two percent reported having no friends at all. For young people ages fifteen to twenty-four, over the past two decades, the amount of time spent with friends in person has decreased by seventy percent. As one seventeen-year-old told author Jean Twenge (as she reports in her book, Generations), “My generation lost interest in socializing in person — they don’t have physical get-togethers, they just text together, and they can stay at home.”
It’s not that young people don’t understand their predicament. Indeed, an internal study by Facebook found that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Teens sense social media is causing problems, but they fear that leaving these apps will make them social pariahs. Even when they do get together in person, technology obstructs the interaction.
To argue smartphones and social media can isolate and immiserate us is a banality, yet our response to these social disruptors continues to be feeble. Some of these studies are ten years old, yet in the interim, loneliness became an epidemic, and, if anything, taboos around smartphone use in public and social settings only slackened. Devices are ever more compelling, we are now habituated to their ubiquity, and the result is public spaces and informal gatherings that are increasingly inimical to conversation.
Sherry Turkle describes the “rule of three” in modern group socializing: so long as at least three people have their heads up, people feel license to check their phone and temporarily drop out. The resulting conversation is disjointed and shallow, limping along but unable to achieve any complexity or depth. It’s a “tragedy of the conversations,” if you will. No one feels responsible, so everyone seeks their own pleasure while the shared conversation suffers.
Your waiter will never try to take your order while texting and assure you, “Go ahead, I’m listening.” Neither will your therapist or barista. But in social settings, where we don’t pay people to be nice to us, we generally pretend that checking our phone while someone talks is neither rude nor limiting to our ability to engage with the conversation meaningfully. It’s a convenient lie.
. . . we generally pretend that checking our phones while someone talks is neither rude nor limiting our ability to engage with the conversation meaningfully. It’s a convenient lie.
While chiding friends and family is certainly one option (“Hang up and hang out!”), I’m curious whether a less confrontational, more inviting path is possible. The norm now is to do everything ad hoc and informally, which correlates with distracted, unsatisfying conversation. My theory is that breaking with this norm by putting thought and effort into a formal, structured event can foster a conversation-friendly space, where you don’t have to hound friends to put their phones away because the peer pressure does it for you.
As I mentioned, and as we all know, conversation among restaurant patrons is an increasingly rare phenomenon. But a few years ago, while working at a restaurant, I found life among the waitstaff to be quite the opposite. Management required phones to be out of sight, creating all sorts of pockets in the day — filling up drinks, waiting at a side stand — wherein conversation was our only available antidote to boredom. 
When you’re out to lunch with someone, it’s hard to compete with his Instagram, but in the monotony of refilling yet another Diet Coke, chitchat is a respite. I made surprisingly good relationships in those focused snippets over the years. These pockets where conversation is welcomed reveal how often it swims against the current. It turns out, talking can be easy and natural when both people are attending.
So, how can you and I set up the conditions for open and healthy conversation without the intrusion of phones?
Physical occupation seems to be key: you can’t check your phone too much if your hands are busy. The call of a big sink of dishes or a yard full of weeds, both of which require real, hands-on attention, can afford such an opportunity. Busy feet also work well: Long hikes provide a similar break from the competing interests typically present in conversation. If you’re going to be on the trail for ten hours anyway, time passes much more pleasantly if you’re practicing a wedding toast, spinning an elaborate yarn, or talking love lives.
It helps to establish shared expectations, too. Since people often ignore strangers by surfing their phones in unfamiliar settings, you will need a place where people are physically engaged and ready to talk to new people and old friends alike. So a little structure, even a little artificiality, seems in order for anyone trying to create a conversation-positive experience.
Since people often ignore strangers by surfing their phones in unfamiliar settings, you will need a place where people are physically engaged and ready to talk to new people and old friends alike.
Take, for example, Nick Gray’s approach in his short book, The 2 Hour Cocktail Party. If people are usually too cool to care, to commit in advance, or to engage in conversation, Gray urges hosts to be unironically enthusiastic about an evening of meeting and talking to new people. In much of life, conversation is now treated as a last resort. At these parties, it’s the main attraction. When you meet someone new, join a different conversation, or ask a question, you can anticipate a motivated, welcoming interlocutor.
I’ve now hosted several of these cocktail parties, and watching twenty-five people talk for two hours without a phone in sight feels both rare and gratifying. I don’t put a “No Phones!” sign up, nor do I put a box for phones by the door (although I think about it). Instead, I help carve out a space where the social norms encourage rather than thwart people’s natural instincts for connection.
Of course, there’s more to hosting than just trusting in people’s natural instincts. In the first place, such a party naturally selects for people who are outgoing, talkative, and find conversation stimulating. They have opted in to a social event, after all. This isn’t a scalable solution, a magic bullet. And there are some hosting tricks such as name tags and icebreakers, which help relieve awkwardness and prevent cliques from forming. They send the message: “We’re all part of one group of mingling people.”
And, again, it helps that we’re keeping people’s hands busy: You’ll find it is much harder to check your phone while standing up, with a martini in your left hand and an hors d’oeuvre in your right, than it is to do so slumped over in a restaurant booth. But a similar effect can be had at a sit-down dinner party as long as you serve it “family style,” so that everybody has to keep passing things (after which, you can make them all help clean up).
For all the fun and success of these parties, there is still friction that comes with being countercultural. When work is often conducted on the fly — by Slack, email, and text — it’s natural for our social lives to be similarly last-minute. To commit to one thing in advance and then to be in that one place at that particular time cuts against the grain of our modern life, which idolizes flexibility and hyper-stimulation. But what may be necessary for work can be disastrous for socializing.
A life of delayed, soft commitments, a life spent always somewhere else, can ruin even the best party, marriage, or conversation. Just as there is a growing backlash against the modern dating landscape that presents seemingly limitless choices yet makes healthy coupling feel more out of reach than ever, I hope our status quo around modern socializing can change next. Rather than merely rail against Instagram or smartphones (which my wife can attest, I still do plenty), we might keep ourselves on the lookout for ways to relate that feel more quaint, more permanent, more human. For me, that’s been a dinner, a party, a hike, a standing coffee. What might it look like for you?
