How much is too much?
I like to think that I’m the kind of guy that keeps in touch with his significant other at reasonable intervals. I say that based on the few times when a woman has been kind enough to let me spend time with her as her inamorato.
I have never understood the strange preoccupation with calling people on the phone all the time. When I was at KU, I used to always see people talking on the phone while walking from class to class, and invariably, they would be asking each other what they were doing, and responding that they were walking from class to class. Pardon if I seem a bit out of touch, but is it really necessary to call your roommate at home and tell them that you just finished your journalism I class and are on your way to your intro psych lecture? It seemed obvious to me that the roommate (or whomever) never really needed to know that information, but that it was being passed on to the listener more out of a sense of boredom.
It isn’t as if those constant phone calls to other people bring those people closer together. I could understand it if I heard people discussing literature, arranging a date, purchasing tickets for a concert to attend together, or hashing out political positions. Instead, they simply reported mundane and pedestrian details about their mundane and pedestrian lives to each other as if it meant something. Telling someone that you ate a bowl of chili for lunch is quite a tepid conversational topic, unless you pronounce it to be the best chili on the face of the planet, or unless there was some other relevance to the bit of information. Revealing that you just finished walking up the stairs in front of Snow Hall isn’t really a legitimate piece of information to provide to a listener unless they are trying to find you near Snow Hall or something like that.
My brother and I have avoided doing things like that. We typically phone each other to talk when we actually have something to talk about (usually once every couple weeks). When we call each other, we have enough material to talk about to fill up about an hour or so, and when we run out of things to talk about, we hang up the phone and get back to living a life so that we have more material to talk about for the next time we call.
Strangely, though, my brother has abandoned this straight-forward method of communication when it comes to his new wife. Actually, they were doing this well before they got married, but they seem to be the neediest couple I have ever seen. I can understand phoning each other once per day. It’s a bit excessive, but they just got married, so they get a bit of slack. Unless you have one of the most exciting jobs in existence, you really don’t have a whole lot to talk about after a day at the office to fill in someone on your day’s activities on a daily basis. But yet, my brother has been on the phone with his wife nearly a half-dozen times today (both phone calls to her and phone calls from her) in the last 4 hours.
While once a day is a permissible excess which should wear off a bit over time, calling every half hour seems less on the ‘I love you’ side and more on the ‘I’m obsessively needy’ side of the line.
Am I being too picky? I mean, it isn’t my relationship, and I’m not going to interfere even if I do think it’s a bit weird, but am I being too judgmental in finding it to be weird?
I have never understood the strange preoccupation with calling people on the phone all the time. When I was at KU, I used to always see people talking on the phone while walking from class to class, and invariably, they would be asking each other what they were doing, and responding that they were walking from class to class. Pardon if I seem a bit out of touch, but is it really necessary to call your roommate at home and tell them that you just finished your journalism I class and are on your way to your intro psych lecture? It seemed obvious to me that the roommate (or whomever) never really needed to know that information, but that it was being passed on to the listener more out of a sense of boredom.
It isn’t as if those constant phone calls to other people bring those people closer together. I could understand it if I heard people discussing literature, arranging a date, purchasing tickets for a concert to attend together, or hashing out political positions. Instead, they simply reported mundane and pedestrian details about their mundane and pedestrian lives to each other as if it meant something. Telling someone that you ate a bowl of chili for lunch is quite a tepid conversational topic, unless you pronounce it to be the best chili on the face of the planet, or unless there was some other relevance to the bit of information. Revealing that you just finished walking up the stairs in front of Snow Hall isn’t really a legitimate piece of information to provide to a listener unless they are trying to find you near Snow Hall or something like that.
My brother and I have avoided doing things like that. We typically phone each other to talk when we actually have something to talk about (usually once every couple weeks). When we call each other, we have enough material to talk about to fill up about an hour or so, and when we run out of things to talk about, we hang up the phone and get back to living a life so that we have more material to talk about for the next time we call.
Strangely, though, my brother has abandoned this straight-forward method of communication when it comes to his new wife. Actually, they were doing this well before they got married, but they seem to be the neediest couple I have ever seen. I can understand phoning each other once per day. It’s a bit excessive, but they just got married, so they get a bit of slack. Unless you have one of the most exciting jobs in existence, you really don’t have a whole lot to talk about after a day at the office to fill in someone on your day’s activities on a daily basis. But yet, my brother has been on the phone with his wife nearly a half-dozen times today (both phone calls to her and phone calls from her) in the last 4 hours.
While once a day is a permissible excess which should wear off a bit over time, calling every half hour seems less on the ‘I love you’ side and more on the ‘I’m obsessively needy’ side of the line.
Am I being too picky? I mean, it isn’t my relationship, and I’m not going to interfere even if I do think it’s a bit weird, but am I being too judgmental in finding it to be weird?
posted by The Academian | 11:26 PM
2 Comments:
Yes, and yes. Sometimes people like talking to each other for no good reason at all. It's generally called love and/or friendship.
MMD
1) I'm happy to hear from you. Nobody had responded to my e-mails. I'm quite ecstatic to hear from you, even if in reproach.
2)I like to think that I have (or have had) a few good friends in my life so far, with whom I have had decent relationships. We tend to talk to each other periodically to update each other on what is going on in our lives, but we tend to do so only when there is something new to report. For instance, I talk to my friend Matt quite frequently, and we talk to each other about politics, science, gaming, and interesting news stories we've read in the few days since we last talked. But I've never called him without anything to tell him. Is that really so weird?
3)Perhaps I'm being too judgmental as you suggest. I just can't shake the nagging feeling that there is something unusual about calling your wife to ask her about whether you can purchase some groceries when she is two states away and won't return for another two years. She isn't the one eating the groceries, but allowing her to veto items on your grocery list seems a little odd.
4) I miss you, and hope you are doing well in the big city. I'm sorry again for the perceived insult to you, and I hope you understand that I didn't mean for it to be insulting (I actually thought it was an offhand compliment to my friends).
5) If you hear from any of the others, please, tell them that I miss them too.
Post a Comment
<< Home