Particularly those who don’t have kids.
Don’t have a partner. Would talk to them about things I’ve read, want to read, or thinks I’m learning/want to learn.
We do have kids, but leaving aside kid-based topics:
- shared hobbies
- our finances, our house
- social justice
- local news
- art history
- architecture
- how our cats are, in fact, little babies
- friend-group drama
- food and food culture
We try to engage in each other’s interest, even though we have completely different hobbies. My wife is quite spiritual, so when she learns something new, we discuss it and I try to understand it and I challenge the topic and we have a good talk about it.
My interests are mainly about technical stuff, and she tries to understand what I’m working on.
But mainly we stare into the void for a good hour after kids are put to bed, and then we discuss practical and mundane boring stuff. But, we insist on being more than roommates that shares responsibilities, so when we aren’t sleep deprived or too overwhelmed by parenthood, we have deep conversations. We also work a lot on our selves. We have high ambitions for our self and what kind of life we want for our family, so we talk about our dreams and how we best realise them.
I read somewhere once about a study of how couples with a variety of income and education levels communicated. You might expect really educated couples to sit around and talk about deep philosophy or something, but it turned out basically all couples (at least ones that have been together for a while) all talk about extremely mundane shit. Like to the point that most people just blurt out their thoughts as they have them - and it’s not even really a “conversation”.
Stuff like “Wow, this pan is getting really beat up. We should probably get a new one soon.” “Ok. Ugh I just remembered I have to meet my sister for lunch tomorrow.”
This is pretty much us
What to cook, what happened today at work, what do we do next week end, what needs to be done at home
Been together for almost a decade and haven’t started on our parenting journey yet. Honestly, many topics. We’re both very critical of the world around us and kinda tired with people being automatons so much of our convo is just hating, lol. Personally, I’m a religious man (Abrahamic monotheism in the form of Islam) with a lifetime background in Western philosophy so I talk a lot about death (it comes naturally!) and my wife entertains it and the convos that flow from it (unless it’s too late, or too early, haha). We don’t really do much “pointless small talk” but we’re both neurospicy so that checks out. Besides that, we just like to annoy each other and say stupid, triggering things, and that’s probably a good 10% of all of our interactions. 😅
We do have kids, but they are grown.
My wife has a long term illness and is on disability, so most of the subjects she brings up are pain, dizziness, weakness, doctor appointments, and tests.
I’m still working full time (although ~99% remote now). I will mention things that happened at work (funny things, annoying things, etc).
We talk about TV shows and movies. We talk about next meals. We talk about things we need to fix in the house.
Edit: there’s also a lot of pebbling. We find funny things online and share them via text. Often when we’re sitting right next to each other.
Video games, travel, politics, food, sometimes sports. Also a lot of calling each other and denying being cute :3
All the usual domestic stuff that everyone has mentioned, but also the books that we are each reading, the films and TV that we watch together, and ideas from the assorted podcasts and videos that we each watch/listen to separately.
Unless there is something that dominates anyway, we usually make a point to share something that we have each learned and something that made each of laugh that day over dinner.
In broad terms it’s practical/domestic stuff, politics/philosophy/economics and gossip. Having kids just means those subjects are in relation to them more. Been together 10 years.
