I have noticed, over a long time, that there is a twenty-minute limit on the kind of conversation I can have alone in a room with my father. Not because of any conflict between us. Not because we don’t love each other. The limit is structural, almost mechanical, and once I understood it as a pattern rather than a personal failing, I started watching it the way you’d watch weather.
I was at my parents’ house in London a few years ago, sometime in the strange middle of an afternoon, and my mother went out to the shops. She said she’d be about an hour. She closed the front door. The house went quiet.
My father was in the living room. I was in the kitchen, making a tea I didn’t really want. We had not yet had a one-on-one conversation longer than three sentences in the entire visit, which was on day four. I stood at the kettle and felt, with a clarity that almost made me laugh, the timer start.
I have, somewhere in me, a stopwatch that begins the moment I’m alone in a room with my father.
It runs for about twenty minutes. Inside those twenty minutes, we can have a perfectly nice conversation about football, the weather, the route I took from the airport, how the dogs are doing, and what I think of his neighbor’s new fence. After twenty minutes, the available topics are exhausted, and a particular kind of silence arrives that neither of us has the equipment to handle. The silence isn’t hostile. It isn’t even uncomfortable, exactly. It is more like the moment in a card game when both players have played all their cards and are sitting there with empty hands, looking at each other, unsure of what the rules say comes next. One of us will eventually stand up. One of us will eventually remember an errand. One of us will turn on the television, or pick up a paper, or wander out to the garden to look at something that doesn’t really need looking at. The silence ends, but it ends by being escaped, not by being filled.
I love my father. I want to be clear about that, because the thing I’m describing is one of the most loving and least understood relationships in my life. There is nothing wrong between us. There is no estrangement, no buried fight, no resentment I’m sitting on. We get along. We’re glad to see each other. The problem isn’t the relationship.
The problem is that neither of us was ever taught what men say to each other when nothing needs fixing.
What we were trained to do, instead
My father and I have a near-perfect track record on tasks.
If something is broken, we can spend three hours together with no awkwardness whatsoever. A leaky tap. A car that won’t start. A shelf that needs putting up. A garden that needs clearing. Hand my father a problem and we’ll be in the same room, comfortably, for as long as the problem takes to solve, and we’ll come out the other end having communicated quite a lot, in our way, through the passing of tools, the small grunts of agreement, the shared satisfaction of looking at a thing that wasn’t fixed and is now fixed.
This isn’t unique to us. I’ve watched my friends and their fathers all over the world, and the pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent. Men of my father’s generation, and a fair number of men my own age, learned how to be in a room with another man by working alongside him. The room had to have a job in it.
What my father didn’t learn, and what, by extension, he didn’t teach me, is what to do in a room that has no job in it. The room with no project. The room where the tap isn’t leaking and the car is fine and there’s nothing to be put up or cleared or fixed. The room where the only available activity is being two people, in chairs, talking about something other than the work in front of you.
That room, for us, has a twenty-minute lifespan. After that, the silence becomes a presence in itself, and we both, almost reflexively, start looking for the door.
It’s not awkwardness. It’s a missing language.
I want to push back on the idea that what’s happening here is awkwardness, because I don’t think that’s quite right.
Awkwardness implies discomfort. The thing that happens between me and my father after twenty minutes isn’t uncomfortable, exactly. It’s more like running out of road. We’ve used the available vocabulary. We’ve discussed the available subjects. There’s a vast continent of things we could, theoretically, talk about. How he’s actually feeling about getting older. What he thinks about the kind of man I’ve become. What he wishes he’d done differently, what he’s afraid of. Neither of us has been given the words for that continent.
It’s not that we don’t want to go there. It’s that neither of us was handed a map.
I think this is the part that gets misunderstood about a lot of father-son relationships. People assume, when they see a quiet middle-aged man and his quieter elderly father at a restaurant not saying much to each other, that something has gone wrong. That there’s a wound there. That one of them has hurt the other and they’re enduring each other through gritted teeth.
That’s sometimes true. But more often, in my observation, the silence is not a wound. It’s an absence. It’s two people who love each other a lot, sitting in the space where a language should have been, doing the best they can without one.
What my father did teach me
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a complaint, because it isn’t.
My father taught me a lot. He taught me how to fix things. He taught me how to keep my word. He taught me how to show up for people without making a big deal of it. He taught me how to handle bad news without falling apart, and how to make a steak, and how to drive a manual car. He taught me, by example, what a long marriage looks like when you don’t perform it for anyone else.
What he didn’t teach me, because nobody had taught him, was how to talk to another man about anything that mattered when neither of you had a wrench in your hand.
And here’s the thing I’ve started to understand, late, in my late thirties: that wasn’t his failure. He was a son too. The man who raised him said even less than he says. The man who raised that man said less still. There’s a long line of men behind me, going back I don’t know how many generations, who learned to love each other entirely through actions, almost never through words. By the time I arrived, the inheritance was thin.
I’m not the first man in the line who’s noticed. But I might, if I’m careful, be one of the first who tries to do something about it.
What I’ve started doing, very small
I’m not going to tell you I’ve solved this. I haven’t. I’m telling you, instead, what I’ve started trying, because the trying itself has changed something.
The first thing was that I stopped pretending the twenty-minute thing wasn’t happening. For a long time, I’d accepted it as just the way it was. Some fathers and sons talk easily; we didn’t; that was that. Once I let myself notice it as a real thing, a structural feature of our relationship rather than an unchangeable fact of nature, I could, very carefully, start working on it.
The second thing was that I stopped relying on conversation to do the work. I started suggesting we do things together. Long walks. Drives with no real destination. The garden. A car-park errand that needed doing. The genius of these activities is that they have just enough task in them to satisfy our generational programming, and just enough quiet in them that an actual conversation can sneak in around the edges.
I have had some of the realest conversations of my life with my father in moving cars. There is something about both of us facing forward, hands occupied, eyes on the road, that lets us say things that would be impossible across a kitchen table. We’ve talked, in cars, about my grandfather. We’ve talked about death. We’ve talked about regret, in the careful, sideways way men of his generation talk about it. None of these conversations would have happened in the living room. The living room has too much eye contact. The living room has nothing to do with our hands.
The third thing, and this is the hardest one, was that I started, occasionally, naming what I was feeling. Not in a big speech. In one sentence, dropped into a gap. I’m glad we’re doing this. Or, I worry about you. Or, once, I love you, you know, said into a windscreen on the M25, because I’d just been thinking it and couldn’t think of any reason not to say it out loud.
He didn’t say much back, that time. He just nodded, slightly. But I noticed he drove the rest of the way home a little differently. Slower. More carefully. Like a man holding something.
What I’d say to other sons
The twenty-minute rule is not a verdict on your relationship. It is a feature of a particular kind of inheritance. Most of the men reading this got the same inheritance. The fact that you can’t sit alone in a room with your father for an hour without one of you reaching for the remote is not proof that something is wrong between you. It’s proof that the men in your line, going back a long way, did most of their loving with their hands, and the loving with words got dropped on the way down.
You can pick it back up. You can’t, probably, do it through a confrontation or a Big Conversation. The big conversations don’t work for men like us. We freeze. We make jokes. We change the subject. The big conversations are for people who already have the language.
What works, in my experience, is the small conversations. The car. The walk. The errand. The one sentence you drop into the silence without making a thing of it. The willingness to extend the twenty minutes to twenty-five, then thirty, then maybe, one Tuesday afternoon, an hour without either of you noticing.
My father is in his seventies. I’m in my late thirties. The kettle is boiling. The afternoon is long. There’s no fence to fix, today, and the two of us are still sitting in a room with no job in it, and the stopwatch, somewhere inside me, is still running.
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