I’ve been called “too intense” more times than I can count. At parties, at work functions, on dates, at family gatherings where the expected mode of interaction is light and breezy and nobody is supposed to bring up anything that requires more than thirty seconds of thought. I’ve watched people’s eyes glaze over when I accidentally steered a conversation somewhere real. I’ve felt the subtle social punishment of being the person who doesn’t know how to keep things casual.
For years I assumed there was something wrong with me. That small talk was a basic social skill I’d somehow failed to develop, like a muscle everyone else had exercised and I’d neglected. I tried to fix it. I read articles about conversation starters. I practiced asking people about their weekends with convincing enthusiasm. I learned the rhythms of surface-level exchange – ask a question, nod, respond with something equally light, repeat until someone finds an excuse to walk away.
I’m 37 now, and I’ve finally stopped trying to fix it. Not because I’ve given up on social interaction. Because I’ve realised the problem was never that I can’t do small talk. It’s that small talk feels like two people silently agreeing to pretend they’re not both thinking about something more interesting. And I’ve never been able to make that agreement without feeling like I’m wasting something – my time, their time, the finite number of conversations any of us actually get to have.
What small talk actually is
I want to be fair to small talk before I explain why it makes me want to leave the room. Small talk serves a legitimate social function. It’s a scanning protocol – a low-stakes way for two people to assess each other before deciding whether to go deeper. It establishes safety. It signals friendliness. It says “I’m not a threat, you’re not a threat, we can coexist in this space without tension.” For a lot of people, that ritual is genuinely comforting. It’s the social equivalent of a handshake – brief, ceremonial, functional.
I understand this intellectually. I even respect it. What I can’t do is participate in it without a growing sense that we’re both pretending. That underneath the conversation about the weather and the traffic and what we did on the weekend, there are actual thoughts happening – real ones, interesting ones, the kind that would make this interaction worth having – and we’ve mutually agreed to ignore them in favour of something safe.
The weather is not interesting. I’m sorry. I know that’s the point – that the content doesn’t matter, that the ritual is the content. But my brain doesn’t work that way. My brain hears someone say “nice weather we’re having” and immediately starts wondering why we’ve structured an entire social convention around the avoidance of meaning. And then I’m thinking about the sociology of politeness, or the evolutionary function of phatic communication, or what it says about a culture that its primary form of social bonding is the explicit agreement to say nothing of substance – and suddenly I’m three layers deeper than the conversation and the other person is looking at me like I’ve just arrived from a different planet.
Which, socially speaking, I have.
The intensity problem
Here’s what happens when you’re wired for depth in a world that mostly operates on surface: you learn very quickly that your natural mode makes people uncomfortable. Not everyone. But enough people, in enough situations, that you develop an early awareness of being too much.
Too much thought in a casual conversation. Too much honesty in a situation that called for pleasantry. Too much interest in things other people are content to skim past. You ask someone how they’re really doing and they look at you like you’ve asked them to take off a mask they didn’t know they were wearing. You try to take a conversation somewhere interesting and you can feel the other person pulling back, looking for the exit, wondering why you can’t just be normal about this.
So you learn to dial it down. To keep things at the frequency the room expects. To hold the deeper thoughts for later – for the drive home, for the journal, for the conversation you’ll have with yourself at two in the morning when nobody needs you to be light. You develop a social persona that’s several degrees less intense than your actual internal experience, and you deploy it in every situation where depth isn’t welcome, which turns out to be most situations.
The problem is that the dial-down costs energy. Significant energy. Not because you’re performing extroversion – though there’s some of that – but because you’re actively suppressing a cognitive process that wants to go deeper. You’re sitting in a conversation about someone’s renovation and your brain is trying to explore why we invest so much identity in our living spaces while you’re nodding and saying “oh that sounds lovely” and the gap between what you’re thinking and what you’re saying is burning through processing power like a computer running two operating systems at once.
That’s why small talk is exhausting. Not because the interaction is inherently draining. Because the suppression is. You’re spending the entire conversation holding yourself back from the version of the conversation you’d actually want to have, and that restraint is what sends you home needing three hours alone to recover.
What I actually want from conversation
I don’t want every interaction to be a philosophical deep dive. I’m not trying to discuss mortality over coffee with my barista. I understand context. I understand that not every moment calls for depth and not every person is available for it.
But what I want – and what I suspect a lot of people who struggle with small talk actually want – is conversations that go somewhere. That start at one place and end at another. Where both people are genuinely curious about what the other person thinks, rather than just exchanging pre-approved social sounds. Conversations that have a point, even if the point is just “I learned something about you I didn’t know before” or “we discovered we see this thing differently and that’s interesting.”
These conversations don’t have to be heavy. Some of the best ones I’ve had have been funny, light, even silly. The depth isn’t about the topic. It’s about the engagement. Two people actually paying attention to each other, actually responding to what’s being said rather than cycling through scripts. You can have a deep conversation about sandwiches if both people are genuinely present for it. And you can have a shallow conversation about grief if both people are just going through the motions.
What I can’t do – what my brain refuses to cooperate with, no matter how many times I’ve tried to train it otherwise – is the script. The exchange of social tokens that doesn’t require anyone to be actually present. The conversation where we’re both performing the appearance of connection while carefully avoiding actual connection. My brain treats that as a waste of resources, and it rebels against it the way your body rebels against food it can’t digest. Not with drama. Just with a deep, persistent discomfort that builds until I either find a way to take the conversation somewhere real or find a way to leave it entirely.
The social cost of not doing small talk
There’s a real cost to being this way, and I don’t want to romanticise it. People who can’t do small talk are at a social disadvantage in dozens of everyday situations. Networking events. Office kitchens. School pickups. Neighbourhood barbecues. Any context where the expected mode is light and the currency is pleasantry and the person who goes too deep too fast is the person everyone avoids next time.
I’ve been that person. I’ve watched people develop a slight wariness around me – not hostility, just the caution you develop around someone who might, at any moment, turn a conversation about the footy into a conversation about what people actually need from spectator sports and why we invest so much emotion in outcomes we can’t control. That’s not a conversation most people want to have at a barbecue. I understand that. I just can’t always stop my brain from going there.
The result is a social life that’s narrow but deep. A small number of people who not only tolerate the intensity but actively enjoy it. Friends who text me at midnight with a question about something they’ve been thinking about. Conversations that go for three hours and feel like thirty minutes. Relationships built on the exchange of actual thoughts rather than the performance of social ease.
It’s a good social life. It’s also a small one. And there are times when the smallness is lonely – when I watch people who are fluent in small talk move easily through social situations that I find exhausting, collecting acquaintances and connections and casual friendships with an ease that seems almost supernatural to me. They’re not better people. They’re just better at the scanning protocol. And in a world where the scanning protocol is the entry point for most relationships, being bad at it means missing a lot of doors.
What I’ve stopped apologising for
I’ve stopped apologising for being intense. Not because intensity is always appropriate – it’s not, and I’m still learning to read when depth is welcome and when it isn’t. But because the apology was based on a premise I no longer accept: that the surface version of social interaction is the correct one and anything deeper is a deviation that needs to be justified.
Small talk is one way of being with people. It’s not the way. It’s a protocol that works for certain brains in certain contexts, and for those brains, it’s perfectly natural and perfectly fine. But for brains like mine – brains that default to depth, that process information in layers, that find surface-level exchange genuinely difficult not because of anxiety but because of wiring – small talk is a foreign language. And I’m tired of treating my native language as something to be ashamed of.
The conversations I want to have are not too much. They’re just more than what most social situations are set up to handle. And the people who want to have them with me – the ones who light up when a conversation takes an unexpected turn, who lean in when things get interesting instead of pulling back, who text me afterward saying “I’ve been thinking about what you said” – those people aren’t too much either. They’re the right amount. We’re just the right amount for each other.
I’m 37 and I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I will never be the person who’s good at parties. Never be the one who chats easily with strangers or keeps things light or makes comfortable small talk look effortless. I will always be the one who’s thinking about something three levels below the surface of whatever we’re supposedly talking about, and I will always be slightly out of step with conversations that aren’t going anywhere.
But I’ve also noticed something about the people who find me too intense: they rarely remember our conversations. And the people who don’t find me too intense – the ones who match the depth, who meet me where I actually am instead of where the social script says I should be – they remember everything we talked about. Because we were actually there. Both of us. Not performing. Not scanning. Not pretending we weren’t thinking about something more interesting.
Just talking. The way I always thought talking was supposed to go.
