My wife has a rather odd magnetism to her, what I call her "bartender face." In her presence people, for some reason, feel perfectly authorized to tell her the most intimate details of their lives. What starts out as a casual business connection over the phone, or a chance acquaintance at the check-out counter, suddenly degenerates into a confession, usually against a great show of discouragement by my wife, as if their confession has shut off their social-etiquette radar. The most upsetting of these ad hoc shrivings was by a deliveryman who, in the course of delivering a package, proceeded to involve my wife in a tale of his coronary heart surgery. To make his point, he opened his shirt to show her the scars, completely oblivious to the fact that my wife didn't relish a half-naked elderly man in the office and resented with great distaste his presumption that what he had to say was so interesting and so vital that he could trample over the accepted boundaries of politeness.
After one of these sessions, which she seems unable to stop because she doesn't want to be rude and tell the person to shut up, she feels used, burdened by an intimacy that treats her as if she were an emotional landfill. People come and dump their problems and then merrily go along, oblivious to the aftermath that my wife has to clean up. She wants people to be either secure enough in themselves to keep their mouths shut, or considerate enough not to mistake their selfishness, their monologue, for a shared secret. She may be asking too much.
People seem less restrained than they used to be about dragging their skeletons out for show. One of the possible reasons is that people have devalued intimacy by mistaking it for casualness, a "Hi" being thought a sufficient prelude to "Bless me, Father." Where once it was a matter of equals agreeing to share what is not normally shared in day-to-day intercourse, intimacy has now been reduced to a handshake, a way of introducing how cool one is because seemingly free of the usual petty social hang-ups prompted by etiquette. It is as if people want to establish credentials of sincerity about themselves right away by exposing what appear to be their inmost laundry.
But there is a subtle, if unconscious, Machiavellianism here, a play for sympathy and credibility without a commensurate risk of reciprocal openness. The intimacy is a mask, a shadow dance. It's not really an invitation to collaborate but an injunction against judging deeply or truly. And that judgment won't take place because the speaker controls the information and that information, while wearing the guise of revelation, is stacked on a favorable slant: One's first impression will be a good impression because it will be the only impression. Intimacy in this case is really a first line of defense.
But this isn't the whole story. It may explain what happens in singles bars, but it doesn't explain why the hairdressers and deliverymen and sales reps feel it necessary to speak explicitly to a total stranger without any provocation at all. What is the pressure that causes the spasm of disclosure? My wife has remarked that she feels a palpable desperation in these people, and this is what probably keeps her attentive when she doesn't want to listen. They sound so pathetic, so needing, and who is she to deny them a day in court? Desperation. Thoreau once said that the mass of people live lives of quiet desperation because they are living the lives they do not really want, lives of forced anonymity and valueless toil. Is it that these people are so ground down by life that they feel they are standing outside the Last-Chance gas station with their thumb out hoping someone will pick them up and save them from walking across the desert by themselves?
We can get too deeply into the pathos of this, of toiling masses yearning to be free, but it has a useful edge to it. It seems to me that what might cause people to open up so readily and yet be so oblivious to the effect of their openness is some combination of the two situations we've been talking about here. On the one hand, people are desperate creatures. We are all filled with a sense of mortal transience. We know full well, on the deepest level of our bones, that most of us will pass from the earth without a thought being given to our having lived. This is an intolerable concept, one so corrosive that we do not admit it to the fraternity of people. Yet it will out. We all need some reassurance that we are alive, that we are not totally unnamed. And so strong is this need that it will breach strong walls of social training. To speak out to any ear, no matter if the ear is not affectionate, is to validate one's being.
On the other hand, humans are cagey creatures. The impulse to expose oneself to being named carries with it the caveat not to be named too closely because that would give the namer power to destroy. So, one does not become overly concerned with the listener. To admit the humanity of the listener would be to defuse the confession. This would bring with it the responsibility to listen to the listener's confession and the risk of real, rather than nominal, intimacy. The confessee is not interested in this risk, and so therefore is not interested in the effect his confession will make. He needs a wastebasket, not a mirror.
Yet humanity can't be totally denied without some residual guilt. So the confessee will allow the other person some interaction, some level of judging, but on the confessee's terms. What ends up happening is that the confessee hacks a twisty trail out from his sanctuary that allows his need for being known free exit, but does not let the other person back along the trail into the inner sanctum, and instead diverts him or her with a dumb show off to the side. Thus he gets recognized without being named, and named without being recognized. He's alive, not dead; with that reassurance he can get through more days of quiet desperation.
Our polite conversations are just not strong enough to hold back these elemental psychic forces, yet they are strong enough to keep the repressive mechanisms working so that the forces are not unleashed all at once. If we all were to give into that bone-deep fear, and its corollary desire to be known, to be the only one at the center of creation, our society would not hold. But in the interstices, in dull eddying moments, the worm in the apple pops its head above the surface, and in its grim presence we talk to anyone, whether they listen or not.