Creating Dinner Conversation

One of the things I loved growing up were the conversations at dinner. Everyone in my family reads voraciously so at any given meal there would be a smorgasbord of topics that we could get into. I love talking. The ability to have a conversation about practically anything was part of what attracted me to Andrew early on; we both like learning about new things, telling each other about it, and exploring hypotheticals. It probably qualifies as a building block in our marriage.

However, life doesn't always leave room for much reading when you're in the midst of a busy season. Some days the extent of my productivity is maybe managing to Skimm the news; while Andrew arrives home having spent his entire day thinking solely about web development. Of course, we catch each other up on our days, but after that conversation can be rather lacking. And, more often than not, turns dinner conversation into a blow-by-blow account of Theo's day. Which is somewhat interesting but doesn't spark compelling dialogue.

I can't recall exactly how or why we ended up coming up with our solution for boring dinner conversation, but I thought I'd share it in case any one else out there is a nerdy as we are. Our solution?

Podcasts.

After catching up on our day for a few minutes (if we didn't already do so during dinner prep), we listen to a 15 minute or so podcast and then talk about it for the rest of the meal.

We're so weird, I know.

But seriously, we know how North Korea makes money, that Fortune Cookies are actually Japanese (Iron Man III lied), and how not to pitch a startup to a billionaire entrepreneur. We also got completely addicted to Serial and discussed the legal system practically non-stop for three weeks.

It's not something we do every night, maybe once or twice a week tops. But it's a nice option to fall back on, especially after a long day. Learning about a shared interest, in the relaxed atmosphere of dinner, helps draw us together intellectually during a season of life when our days are very divergent.

So, on those tired days when we feel like we have nothing interesting to say, we select a podcast, put a phone into a martini glass (we still haven't bought a speaker), and listen to an explanation about how Norway can afford to buy so many Teslas.

(Header image is the logo for Stitcher Radio, my favourite app for podcast and radio listening.)