Quiet Parties and Lasting Love

One of my favorite stories to tell is that of a couple who came into my restaurant when I was a waiter. They sat down across a large table from each other, asked me if I would kindly bring them paper and a pencil (I obliged with a roll of receipt paper), and then went the entire meal without speaking to each other.

They did, however, write dozens of little letters to each other, taking turns with the pencil and passing them back in forth, like kids in class. Each letter looked to be about a paragraph long, and at the end of the meal they each had a stack of letters the other had written to them.

I couldn’t help myself from asking them at the end of the meal what they had done. The response:

You know, we’ve been married so long that we’ve said everything that needed to be spoken. To keep it interesting, we write to each other now. It makes you think a little more about what you’re saying, and at the end you have something from the time to take away with you.

To this day that remains one of the most simply romantic things I’ve seen, and I think about it often in regard to my relationships.

Now the NYTimes has deemed “Quiet Parties” one of their Year in Ideas. At these parties, held at popular bars, talking is prohibited and guests seek love and friendship through writing only.

Quiet parties are like Internet chat rooms in 3-D: strangers sit in a circle at a round table passing handwritten notes, giggling and making (silent) snarky comments about others in the room. Reprimands are handed out to those who break the quiet code…Lisa France, a 36-year-old filmmaker, went to a quiet party and says it wasn’t until she left that she learned that the man she had been chatting with had a Southern accent.

Marshall McLuhan’s Medium is the Message argues that the effect a message will have is not just influenced by the medium it is transmitted in–it is an essential part of it. This is important to understand for design purposes of course–but the uses of it in personal relationships has been largely ignored, as the medium over which romance was conducted has changed from speech, to paper letters, to the telephone, email, instant messaging, and text messages. With each step, the conversation becomes easier and more convenient–but we forget that an essential part of love is sacrifice.

Perhaps it is time for me to be inconvenienced for the sake of love…