All My Children

Popularity with a large group is useful only to the politician who’s after votes. What you as an individual can use and need is to be appreciated fondly by a small circle of friends for your particular flavour, whether it’s for your generosity or understanding or vivacity or witty tongue. Romantically what you as a teenager need is a chance to get to know and be known by some appropriate members of the opposite sex—a few at a time—in order to reveal your own ideas, to learn to respond to the ideas of others, to let your own qualities of personality come out so that those of the other sex who might cherish them can see them, to find out for yourself what qualities you want and need in a beloved. These things are not at all clear to a young person at first. In order to take advantage of your opportunities to get to know members of the opposite sex, you ought to learn enough easy flirtatiousness to signal interest to them. I don’t mean a heavy seductiveness but a sparkle in the eye, a personal smile, a lightly flattering remark, to show that you think the other person is fun. You should acquire enough facility with light talk so that you can pass ten minutes or an hour with another person while you—and he—decide whether or not there are possibilities in this friendship.

How to be popular—even with a few people—is the aching problem at the beginning of the teen years. The answer appears elusive except to a few lucky ones, who seem to draw others to them as flowers draw bees. Don’t despair. You may have more appealing qualities than you realise. Many of those who have tough going at first have a lot to offer; but they care so much about their relationships that they get paralysed with self-consciousness at first—until they learn some of the lighter approaches.

One approach that young teenagers fall into instinctively, when two or more are thrown together, is to find something interesting or fun to do—whether it’s dancing, or playing table-tennis or swimming, or looking up a bird’s song or playing records. Doing something gets you off the spot of having to make conversation every second. The talk of even the world’s best conversationalist will become laboured and painful if he feels he has to talk. (Witness the embarrassment of two famous people when asked to talk and smile for a press photographer.)

I’d say that the most important rule, in any of your human relationships (a rule that’s broken much more often than it’s followed), is to think of the other person rather than of yourself. Then the kinds of questions you can start with are: Where are you from? School or occupation? Future plans? Hobbies? Other interests? This is enough for a three-hour start. If you find that you two are sympathetic, you can go on from these matter-of-course subjects to others which are nearer to the soul, subjects not so easily talked about ordinarily but more satisfying if you’ve found someone with whom there is real understanding.

Those first questions I listed could be asked impersonally, the way a form for a driving licence asks you questions. They could be asked aggressively, the way a lawyer in court asks them. But if you are making friends or even just making conversation, you must ask questions with a combination of interest, friendliness and sensitivity. More important than your initial questions is your attentiveness to the answers. To be a good conversationalist means to be listening more than half of the time. You must be listening not only with your ears but with your eyes, which you keep on the speaker’s eyes, and with your whole facial expression. When he tells you something he considers amusing you naturally smile—at least faintly.

When he speaks of how angry he was, you show your sympathetic indignation.

You have to learn to share an enthusiasm for the speaker’s subject whether you ever had any previous interest in it or not. If someone speaks to you of his love for golf, and it happens to be a game you’ve not only never played but have always looked down on, you should be able, if you have an average amount of amiability and flexibility, to generate a conversational interest in it. You could boldly lead from innocence, confess you’ve never had a club in your hands and ask what the game is really like—just exactly what its joys and frustrations are—what kind of progress the speaker is making. This should not all be dry as dust to you, just because you’ve never played. You are drawing out the speaker to see what kind of person he is. You are encouraging him to be a good story-teller. You are trying to enhance your own charm as a conversationalist and human being. Perhaps, who knows, you are launching the great love of your life. If it turns out that this is not it, nevertheless you will eventually be using the charm you are developing now when the great occasion comes. The skilful fisherman uses a bit of chicken feather or even a worm to lure the precious trout. You shouldn’t look down on what you consider a dull topic when you are on the search for a fascinating person.

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