Back when people dropped into each other’s houses without being invited, a neighbour used to call to our house and spend hours talking to my parents about the histories of people they knew or at least had heard about.
By histories I mean, who married who; who their parents were; was this person a first or second cousin of that person; who the daughter married; which daughter was that, now; and when she died and what of.
To me as a child this was all terribly boring but, unfortunately, manners apparently dictated that I must sit through it.
By the end of the evening my parents and our visitor would have completed their people-map. They had created out of their memories a sort of a temporary world wide web – or at least a parish wide web – which melted away as soon as the conversation ended.
Memories
That’s all in the past and, no, I don’t feel one bit nostalgic for it as I get older but I was intrigued to read some up-to-date research on this matter of people remembering things together.
According to an article in the Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, "memory interdependence" is the number one predictor of the quality of friendships between people.
The more people build up each other’s recall of events in conversation the more likely they are to have a high-quality friendship. This turns out to be even more important than how long they know each other or how much they trust each other.
It’s almost as though to have someone else to share our reality is a deep need in human relationships.
All of this suggests if you want to get closer to somebody, then talking about shared memories might be the way to do it. I suppose that’s what people are doing who work together all day and spend part of the evening going over memories of who said what and who did what. It can all sound like nonsense to an outsider, and in and of itself that’s probably what it is, but it’s actually about building a relationship.
And equally I guess people who have no interest in discussing their shared memory with their nearest and dearest because they reckon it’s pointless and a waste of time and a bore, are missing an opportunity to bring their nearest and dearest closer (assuming that’s what they want, of course).
I find it rather funny, by the way, that because memory is terribly unreliable, what people might be doing unwittingly is constructing a memory of something that didn’t really happen like that. But that doesn’t matter.
It still creates a sense of closeness and conveys that we understand each other or at least each other’s experiences.
And that’s powerful stuff.
This, note, is very different to imposing your own memories on other people. If you sit in the corner telling your victim for the 59,000th time the innumerable experiences of your exciting life that they did not share, you may be having a whale of a time, but it might also be a good way to send people scurrying when they see you coming.
Literary fiction
On a slightly different topic, I was interested to see that a number of studies now suggest that people who read literary fiction are better at recognising other people’s emotions in real life than those who read pop fiction or fiction in which the characters are less rounded.
In literary fiction the characters are rounded and complex and develop throughout the story. In pop fiction (or, to put it more elegantly, genre fiction) the characters may be less rounded and it’s the story that is complex and that develops throughout.
Shown images of the eye regions of actors’ faces, people who read literary fiction out-perform those who read pop fiction in understanding the emotions of others.
So there it is: to really boost your relationships, read good books and remember them in conversation with other people who have read them. Oh, would that be a book club?
Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.
pomorain@yahoo.com Twitter: @PadraigOMorain