It's Good To Talk

In 1990, BT launched an advertising campaign featuring Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to name but three of his big-screen successes, with the tag line “It’s good to talk.”

At a time when mobile phones were in their infancy, and BT had a monopoly on the landline market, this campaign was less about generating new business and more about getting existing consumers to use their phones more frequently. And the existing customers it targeted were men, hence the choice of Hoskins to front the campaign, because of the sexes, men – despite the fact that it was they who by and large paid the bills – made fewer phone calls.

It’s possibly as true today as it ever was that men are generally less inclined to pick up the phone – whether it’s a landline or a mobile – and call someone up for a chat. Perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes, especially since my wife is not especially inclined to call anyone simply for a chat either, but generally it is my experience (based on an admittedly very small sample), that women are more inclined to use the phone for casual conversations than are men.

Whereas my mother would phone friends and family members regularly, and my first wife would do the same (I never understood why she saw the need to phone someone and chat with them for ages when she had already arranged to meet them that same day, but she did), my father seldom made calls to anyone other than – infrequently – to his brothers or sister. Even after I married and moved away from my parents, I can only recall him phoning me once, and that was for the very practical reason that my mother had recently become afflicted by tinnitus, and was driving him mad with her complaints about the noises in her ears that she thought were cars, lorries, or machinery outside the house.

I don’t recall my father ever calling any friends, although that was largely due to the fact that I don’t remember him ever actually having friends and I definitely don’t recall an occasion on which he went out with friends. That isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy talking – getting him to stop was more often the problem - and whereas most people are ever keen to shoo away Jehovah's Witnesses when they call at the door, when they spoke to my dad it was more likely that they would make excuses and leave!

While BT were telling us, and men in particular, that it was good to talk because that would be good for their profits, the idea that it is good to talk is otherwise rightly based on the fact that it’s good for our mental health. I realise that I am stereotyping wildly (again), but generally, a group of women gathered together will have conversations much different from a similar group of men. Men don’t generally talk with each other about their feelings, their emotions, their fears or their needs. It is possibly a contributor to the alarming statistic that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK, and is responsible for 18 deaths every day.[1]

I admit that I am as reticent as the next man when it comes to expressing my feelings, but I really appreciate the benefits of doing so. My sole experience of professional counselling, which came back in 1993, proved immensely valuable, and while it may not be for everyone, it is definitely something which – if the need arises – should not be written off.

There’s an old saw that suggests that while men utter somewhere in the region of 7,000 words per day, women speak an average of 20,000 although research undertaken in 2007, and published in the American journal, Science suggests that this is way off beam. A decade’s worth of data collected by the University of Arizona in Tucson produced results that had women speaking 16,215 words and men 15,669 per day. I would be interested to know how many words I speak daily; there are many days when I reckon my total would be way below 15k.

A few weeks ago my wife and younger daughter went away for a few days, and although I spoke to them daily on the phone, it quickly dawned on me that barring the odd exchange with someone serving in a coffee shop or the supermarket, I went somewhere in the region of five days without having a face-to-face conversation with anyone. Did that bother me? No, not at all. Being an only child, I have always been comfortable in my own company; I think that I would have been ideally suited to some solitary profession – lighthouse keeper, perhaps – as on balance, I am an introvert. Of course, I knew that at the end of the week, my family were coming home but there are many people for whom a week - and longer - without a face-to-face conversation is the norm, for them it is no trivial problem.

I never considered lighthouse keeping as a career, but I reckon it would have been right up my street.

I Googled “am I an introvert” and the definition is me to a tee. Apparently, there is a seemingly paradoxical personality type, the talkative introvert; at times I think that is me, too, but only when there is something worth talking about!

Conversation for the sake of it – what one might call idle jibber-jabber – is sometimes almost physically painful in my experience. That isn’t to say that I can’t yabber on with the best of them (my wife would probably say that, like my father, there are times when it’s difficult to shut me up, and especially when she is talking; she calls it interrupting, I call it joining in – we’ve agreed to differ), but I don’t have a problem with silence, even in company. Companionable silence is, in my view, preferable to inane chatter.

The crux of all this though is that it is good to talk, but like so much in life, it’s about quality, not quantity, about making words count, and while I don’t entirely subscribe to the theory that a problem shared is a problem halved, sharing a problem can at least put it into perspective.

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[1] Source: https://www.thecalmzone.net/