The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [64]
But social change has outpaced biology and cultural ideals. Pregnancy remains a bigger deal than ejaculation, and cookie-cutter ideals of macho and girly, formed when sex roles embodied the division in male and female spheres, remain deeply embedded and still shape desires and tactics for meeting them; breast implants, for instance. Women still wish to be treated like ladies, men still wish to be “real” men; all want independence, but none, if they can help it, to pay the escalating bill.
➺ Rule one: Romance is a dance and an audit
So romantic conversation today has to play some very old games, hurdle towering contradictions, scale skyscraping aspirations, as well as glean mate-rating data.
Luckily it is brilliant at the latter. Even a speed-date, the same duration as the three-minute pop songs and fox-trots our parents and grandparents had to tickle each other’s fancy, is enough to assess if you two might have more to discuss. A survey has found that even though snap judgments rest on surface details, our instinct draws us to physical traits—age, weight, height—that, unlike eye or hair color, give ultrareliable clues to the socioeconomic factors we care about. And not forgetting our voice, which, from vocab to grammar to accent, is a treacherous informant on everything from geographical and social origins, to aspirations to temperament to health.
At the start of a relationship, then, the chief difficulty for would-be pillow talkers isn’t so much working out if you share common ground as shimmying alluringly over it. Flirting is at a premium in contemporary metropolitan society, sexy because those who can get along have more options. And while nineteenth-century Japanese marriage codes allowed “she talks too much” as one of seven grounds for divorce, and while chaps once joked that they proposed marriage to fill an awkward silence (once the frantic blab of courtship dried up), nowadays settling down doesn’t mean an end of conversation.
We should be so lucky. Today, quality communication is an almost oppressive ideal, expected day in, day out, in the talkathon of a long-haul relationship. Über-eligible über talent scout Simon Cowell rationalized his reluctance to get hitched:
The superstitious side of me goes, “I couldn’t follow that.” [My parents] were as happy as I’ve ever seen two people, mainly because they never stopped talking. From the second they woke up to the second they went to bed, yak yak yak, all day long—I used to call them the chipmunks.
Except, when is there time for meetings of minds? Infatuation must be hothoused (like all dopamine-releasers, it is an addiction). But we have so much else to do, plus endless sexual window-shop-portunities—from porn, to online dating services, to the ethereal, not to say fictional, companionship available in virtual worlds. Anyone may have a harem on his/her hard drive, and some may think that if it steams their wetware, hardens their software, it’s good enough.
Other snipers are at work. Now sex roles are unmoored, modern couples’ lives must be custom-built and it’s all up for debate: who cooks, works, holds baby. As if the basic challenge—recalibrating two people’s wants and needs over the vagaries of time—weren’t enough. Never have men and women had so much to discuss. And still we dream of The One. Then again, with artful conversation, we might find him or her.
COURTSHIP, LOVE BOMBS, AND OTHER VERBAL ATTACKS
Courtship does more than kindle intimacy, make loved ones feel loved. Castiglione observed in his 1528 conduct book, The Courtier:
If the means by which the courtier is to win her favour are to be nobility, distinction in arms, letters and music, and gentleness and