NT's referencing to people in your home town you don't know

Post Reply New Topic

Disclaimer: NT is defined as non-asperger in this context

This is one thing that really annoys me when it comes to small talk, the incessant referral to fathers/mothers or sons/daughters of this and that family; "Did you know that the house across the street from Mr.Smiths sons bestfriends house is being sold today?". ...uhm.. I do not care to use brainpower to dig up memories about some smiths, and who their son is, and who their best friend might be, and what street that is, and what house is across the street. Mention the town,streetname and perhaps the color/size of the house, and I have the relevant information to take an interest. Using people they know, but I do not know or barely knew one time to pin point a location, is not at all the best way to relay information to me.

Is it just me who find this kind of referencing confusing?

Another example would be; "Did you hear that the sister of the brother-in-law of the founder of the town got married yesterday?". NO! And I do not care about this person whom neither of us really know at all. If would rather watch all seasons of the soap "Days of our lives"!

..this became more of a rant actually, I apologize. I just needed to air my frustrations.

The town where I live isn't much of a gossip factory. At least, the people I talk to don't talk to me about that kind of thing. One of my close friends may inform me of the activity of the other but that's about it.

My father has started telling me such gossip and I have told him to save his brain cells for remembering if he has taken his heart medication instead of retaining this useless information.

I couldn't care less if it was someone's third or fourth daughter who had a baby!

It is both annoying an weird and allistics call us weirdos but at least we can have an intelligent conversation rather than that the Mrs Jones's son is getting married type of conversation which I choose not to get involved with especially if it is about people who I don't know or even like.

One of the chief characteristics of NTs is there concern with personal relationships. Who is connected to whom and how.

You can always spot the NTs. Jabbering away.

ruveyn

I don't have friends to be honest and I don't get on with people who are the gossip type anyway, so I've never really had to deal with it.

I totally relate to this.
I hate those gossip conversations about people NTs barely know. I actually can't get my head round why people care. I find it the most drab and uninteresting topic of conversation in the universe.

Yes, I hate that. When they find out where you live or work or go to school, they always have to quiz you on whether you know so-and-so. I never know the people they mention, and it makes me feel like a fraud - like I must be lying about where I live or something! I suppose they're just looking for some "it's a small world" connection, but it never works, and even if I do recognize the name, what do you say then?

Hehe, me neither, it is mostly within family I have encountered this behaviour.


I know! One time I started working at this new job, with +400 employees. -"Oh, my neighbours brother works there, do you know him?". -"What!? I started working there 2 weeks ago, it is 400 people there... No! I do not know him!" ...thats what I want to tell them atleast, but I end up just saying "no".
Same thing when I moved to a new place where it lives 5000 people, sure, if you grow up there and have lived there for 20 years, you might know some, but someone who moved there a few months ago will most likely not know the person in question.

True enough, they might just be looking for that "it's a small world" connection.

Sounds like small town typical talk to me. I hear it here all the time. What bothers me is when people give me directions like "Turn left about a mile before where the Dairy Queen was that burned down in 75". If it burned down in 75 how the hell am I supposed to know where it used to be? Or "Turn on the dirt road like you're going to Jimmy Pratt's hunting property". I don't know where that is, I don't hunt.

Eventually you have to learn all this kind of stuff though if you are gonna live in a small town, and not stay at home constantly.

Agree, it could be small town stuff. I get it from my family back east, all of which live in or frequent a tiny town of 3000.

I don't get it from my partner, even when it's her family. I don't know if she feels like I do, or she's just learned that I really don't care.

I spent almost two years obsessing over this phenomena and I actually came up with a plausible theory!
I call it “The Water Cooler Affect”.
People have a tendency to try and connect or find out as much about another person and everyone connected with that person as they possibly can. Everything in their own life is ignored for the purposes of finding out what is wrong or right in another’s life. This can be traced as far back as late elementary school to middle school. The exact reasoning behind a single person’s desire for this can be many but when observing, a fairly obvious behavioral pattern begins to emerge.

Every individual has a different personality trait which allows them to confer with individuals with one or more of the same personality traits. These ambiguous similarities create a gateway for an interpersonal relationship; this allows for large quantities of personal information to be exchanged, ranging from the simplest “what’s your favorite color” to the convoluted “what is your best friend’s mother’s doctor’s name?” This gives the persons involved an obscure feeling of trust and based on the amount of information exchanged their relationship can be defined as being “acquaintances” to even being “lovers”.

The social web which has been constructed by each person involved has now been connected by a force of an equivalent value to that of their relationship, meaning that the stronger the interpersonal relationship the more information of other interpersonal relationships will be conversed between the two individuals. This appears to be the lifeblood of the social community, otherwise referred to as “gossip”.

There exist locations where a number of individuals will congregate and exchange certain amounts of information from one large web to another. This is not specifically creating an interpersonal relationship, it allows for a person to decide whether being a part of a different web will be beneficial or not, depending on the needs of the individual. These locations can range from being workplaces, to being coffee shops. An example one might be familiar with would be the formation of “cliques” inside schools which appears to be the initial formation of this social web.

A likely cause of socialites is the primitive human impulse to group together for survival.

I live in a city of about 12,000 and the Island has a population of about 33,000, does this count as a "small town"?

One of my friends was doing that the last time I saw her, she kept mentioning people from my home town and what they were up to or that she had seen them and blablabla, I just kind of pretended to listen cause it didn't make any difference to me. What did make a difference was when she said "You grew up there and you don't know these people?!" (Like, "What's wrong with you?!") So, I spent 28 years only knowing a few relatives, the people I went to school with, and my church. I stayed at home most of the time, I don't socialize, and I hate gossip. Where would I have met the people she was referring to, and why would I know anything about them?

I can understand why you'd rant, as this issue drives me up the walls as well!
My mom is always blurting out nonsense about people *she* knows.
And when I angrily ask who the heck that person is and why I should care she acts all "Surely you know X? X is Y's brothers girlfriend!".
I DON'T FRIGGIN' KNOW Y, nor their brother and DEFINITELY NOT their girlfriend!! !

And I'd rather sit in a tub of cold water than to *get* to know them either!
They have stupid luxury problems caused by them being dumb/careless etc. etc.

Smalltalk.... RAH! It made me rant a bit too, sigh!! !! !! !! !!

Oh man, I had to put up with smalltalk from the owner of a grocery store today. I had been shopping in her store regulary at an other location years ago, and now I were there shopping in her new store. I mentioned a relevant piece of information, that I had moved and did all my shopping miles away these days(in a third store). Then she started talking about the owner of that local store (same chain as hers) where I live, and how he had been in a long distance relationship for many years, and that he now would finally quit his job and move to his girlfriend, etc, etc.. I was stuck with the cashier so I unavoidably hear much of this rant. She mentioned names I had never heard before, and locations I had no idea where were.

I told myself when I left the store that this is just something NTs need to do, she meant me no harm. Then I smiled and forced myself to NOT repeat the conversation in my head 50 times before I put on some music. I survied a smalltalk-bomb!

Their social group is every NT's intense interest, as far as I can tell. So just think of it like someone talking to you about trains when you're not into trains, or something like that.