CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, relatives, and co-workers can be both illuminating and frightening. At their best, intimate discussions are enlightening when you learn something that you did not know about someone—like that they lost a child to SIDS, or had a child at 17, or dropped out of high school—and that creates an emotional connection that we may not have felt before. I love those moments. It’s the stories with intimate details that turn me off.
At times stories can be both connective and repulsive, like when I was researching family history and discovered: rumours that my grandfather was already married when he married my grandmother; a great-grandfather shared his bed with his eldest daughter while his wife slept elsewhere in the house. Equally fascinating, but less repugnant was news that an aunt and uncle co-habitated long before it was an accepted practice. This was discovered by younger family members only after the husband died leaving his estate to his first wife from whom he never divorced.
While some genealogical facts are interesting from an historical perspective, and from a distance of two generations, there are other, more intimate things that friends share in the here and now that you would rather not know.
The more visibly the listener squirms, the more vivid the details.
Friends and acquaintances who trade confidences too easily, that is they find familiarity where there is none, embarrass me. Even hearing intimate details of the sex lives of close friends makes me uncomfortable. For some people, the more visibly the listener squirms, the more vivid the details. The old expression “TMI” (too much information) springs to mind.
One girlfriend of mine with whom I have long ago lost touch, once told me about how her husband measured up when compared to her vibrator. And I don’t mean in terms of activity or pleasure, but actual measurement—length and breadth. It was a comparison they made together. (I can’t tell you more than that; it creeps me out to repeat the story.) When I emphatically told her to stop, I wanted to hear no more, she called me a prude.
After years of this sort of conversation, I finally told her the truth: our mutual friends disliked hearing the details of their shared sex life, as well, but they laughed about it behind her back.
It’s tough to know the specifics of a couple’s private moments and then and sit across from them at a dinner table pretending not think about it. Or, as was my case, to work with said person every day. What was worse, was that I first worked with her, then him.
I became the friend who knew too much.
A more liberal friend laughed at my predicament. Until she found herself in my shoes. I repeated a story to her about two former co-workers of mine, one of whom was now hers (a man dating our mutual work friend). The guy had seen the gal naked after a night out at a bar and was telling us about it over drinks one night after work. At the excessive prompting of a colleague, he commented the specifics of her pubic region, stating that she was “neatly trimmed” as if she were “expecting company.” I was shocked by this normally conservative guy’s observations as much as I was by our work friend’s insistence on knowing.
To be clear, the point of my repeating the story was to underline the question and its response by men whom we both knew, and were otherwise, polite gentlemen. I was not trying to draw attention to the woman’s personal grooming habits.
However, in the business we were in at the time, we moved around a lot, company to company. We often ended up working with work friends’ former coworkers. Like any industry, the financial services/mutual funds industry of the 1980′s and 1990′s was much like that. We all knew one another, if not personally, then by reputation.
This is exactly what happened when the friend was hired at the same firm as I and met the gal with the good grooming practices, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not get past the image.
I blushed, then laughed.
We all get the inside track from co-workers eager to create closeness by sharing relationship information, but it was an interviewer who really blew my mind when he—the owner of the company, a talent agency—divulged his firefighter fantasy when the topic turned to my husband’s line of work. I blushed, then laughed.
Time had made me far more philosophical about things. There was no reason to take it all so seriously. If he wanted to feign private cozy atmosphere, so be it.
Besides, I think it may have been the reason I got the job.