The “Walk and Talk”: The Ultimate Way To Connect
I am NOT making the case for a walk as a first date.... Listen to the voice over to read along with me!
During peak quarantine (eek...I hate to mention Covid-19 but..) going on walks became THE daily activity. At one point there was a rumor going around Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, that you could get a ticket/fine for walking outside when you should have been inside quarantining. I don’t know where that came from.
These walks were glorious, so many thoughts and conversations were drummed up. So I got to thinking about walking, and talking, and why it’s so tranquil to take a walk and have a chat. I also got to thinking about a walk and talk in the context of romance and connection (of course). Is the walk and talk the sprinkles on top of a successful date?
When looking for source material to add some “hutzzpah” to my writing I accidentally pressed “enter” too soon and just searched “walking” in JStor, leaving out other keywords. I was surprised by how many academic texts have been written about walking: Walking as art, walking as activism, walking as philosophy, walking as a form of anarchy, walking as a form of politics, walking as companionship, walking as an artistic process, everything. I got sidetracked and was particularly interested in the topic of walking as anarchy and read “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”. The essay highlighted Alexandra David-Néel (1868- 1969) and Lily Gair Wilkinson (1873-1957), two of the thousands of women who combined anarchist philosophy and radical walking between 1871 and 1939. I didn’t how you could walk radically but I was interested in finding out. The author Kathy E. Ferguson then looks closely at walking in itself:
“Walking bodies are always bodies-in-situations—someone is walking somewhere. I am addressing situations in which we walk more or less voluntarily: not fleeing, as must refugees; not marching, as do armies; not pacing in confinement, as do prisoners; not negotiating hostile streets, as do walkers marked as vulnerable or dangerous by their gender, sexuality, color, or disability”1
Turns out, in philosophy and political theory there is an expansive history of walking.
“[Simone de] Beauvoir found hiking transformative and developed a ‘mad enthusiasm’ for hours of strenuous mountain journeys. Nietzsche praised the mountainous journey, where ‘even the trails become thoughtful.’...Kirkegaard [said] ‘I walk myself into my best thoughts’”.2 Is that why every influencer and athleisure-wearing person in L.A. is always trying to go on a hike? By the philosophy of Kirkegaard, everyone on those hikes should be having their best thoughts, and yet I found they rarely have anything to say (whoops, I’ve been sipping that haterade). And I know this as someone who went on a couple of these athleisure-wearing-hikes when I lived in the Hollywood Hills.
But I think a hike is different than a walk and talk. There’s nothing strenuous about a walk through the park or around the block (or at least, there shouldn’t be). And on a leisurely walk and talk I’m not out of breath trying to tell you about this funny thing that happened to me last week, or while I’m explaining why rape is a men’s issue and not a women’s issue. I try to take a walk at least once to break up my work day, it’s much easier in Chicago to walk through residential neighborhoods without the hills of Los Angeles and without the temptation of buying a coffee or a little treat for myself when walking through Brooklyn.
Dialogue-heavy movies are difficult to pull off, not too many movie studios want to make them either, but it works in movies like Before Sunrise. (If you need a synopsis on Before Sunrise you can find it in my other essay because I’m not explaining it again.) I would argue that a major contributor to the romance Jesse and Celine spark up while exploring Vienna day and night is the fact that they’re walking and talking. Their conversations can flow within the ease of a walk and talk.
What is it that makes walking and talking so great? Is it because with each step words flow out of your mouth easier than sitting across from someone on a date like it’s a job interview? Maybe our feet are connected to an invisible string attached to our back that makes us speak, like one of those dolls (what are those called?) Is it because you don’t have to look directly at the other person & that it makes it easier to speak from the heart? Funnily enough, that is a part of the reason! Research from an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that “therapists report that walking side by side, with minimal eye contact, helps clients to open up”3 The New York Times article “The Beauty of a ‘Walk and Talk’” by Jancee Dunn, quotes Esther Perel, a couples therapist and author of multiple books including the one all over my Twitter feed called “The State of Affairs.” Esther explains, “When walking next to someone, a conversation becomes parallel play... looking ahead yet connected by the exchange”.4 (I really don’t like quoting the NYT lately, not to excoriate the publication in its entirety, but its coverage of the genocide in Gaza has proved that the NYT has lost its way and credibility, but I do love that mini crossword puzzle.)
“Human walking is often described as controlled falling...Walking means precisely resigning yourself to being an ambulant, forward-leaning body ... Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step as if to take root there again."
“Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking.” - Kathy E. Ferguson
“Controlled falling…”, “resigning yourself…”, “…as if to take root there again” I’m so tempted to make an analogy with falling in love.
After moving out of Brooklyn, where most of the time all you have is walking, I tried to incorporate walking into some of my dates to really get the conversation flowing. One date I went on in Chicago the guy LOVED that I suggested a walk after dinner. He even made a point of us taking a walk on our third date (there was not a fourth). Walking after a first or second date might be a luxury only afforded to those who live in metropolitan cities, (there is the potential for it in Chicago & L.A. depending on the neighborhood...Oh, maybe San Fran? I don’t know, D.C.?) but I can only talk about the cities that I’ve lived in and dated in.
My college was one big long building with only two levels and the lower level was below ground (shout out art school). Junior year when feelings were starting to develop with my soon-to-be boyfriend of multiple years, I distinctly remember us walking and talking down the long sprawling hallways together. He kept walking with me well past his point of departure and I asked him, “Where are you going?” he wasn’t going anywhere, just wanted to keep talking.
In my research, I discovered proof that there's a gendered aspect to walking. “Research has shown that factors influencing women’s walking differ from those affecting men’s”5 (Oh, this source is from SFSU, so that confirms that San Francisco is somewhat walkable). That makes sense, as a woman I’m not going to take a leisurely stroll alone at night, there would hardly be any leisure in that. Even when walking with a man at night I’m still instinctually looking over my shoulder. Walking in the daytime is no better when you’re even more visible and more likely to be catcalled, but I don’t feel like getting into those things, they’re kind of a bummer.
In focusing on the ability to connect through walking and talking, I was looking into “walk and talk” dates and it seems like most women do not like the idea of a walk and talk as a first date. One article on Medium.com from Ossiana Tepfenhart was called “Men Need To STFU With Walk Dates And Coffee Dates”. I do think men need to “STFU”, but for different reasons. However, I do agree, a walk does not work for a first date. A walk and talk needs to come about naturally in addition to an already triumphant date. Paradoxically a planned walk and talk is nice but it should be with someone you already have a connection with, there needs to be a built-up rapport of some sort prior. I don’t know how to explain it but a walk as a first date just isn’t gonna cut it in the hetero-world. Unless we’re going on a walk and talk on the moon… and I don’t even want to do that. But if we’re coming back from dinner, the wine bar, the movie, whatevvvverrr and we end up taking a walk, then so be it.
A part of the beauty of the walk and talk is the potential for comfortable silence that you don’t usually find on a date. Virginia Woolf said, “most English people, have been trained not to see but to talk. Yet...there is a zone of silence in the middle of every art.”6 I’m applying Woolf’s quote to dating and relationships because I think there’s an art to maintaining a successful relationship— with anyone. Silence lives within all of us most beautifully. It’s not necessary to talk all the time, and if it feels necessary to fill every potential silence on a date with chat, well then you might be forcing it. The walk and talk allows you to see if you can momentarily live in silence together (because hey, you might be living together for the rest of your lives…who knows). You can let the sounds of the landscape fill the void, a moment of silence can free the mind for a space to spark an intriguing conversation down the road. Finding little to no discomfort in silence with someone can be evidence of the potential for a successful relationship.
“The essence of the conversation was the togetherness experienced, not the words by which it was achieved.
“‘A Many-Sided Substance’: The Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant.” - Erin Greer
In “A Many-Sided Substance”: The Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant” author Erin Greer breaks down the word “conversation” to its Latin roots: “con (with) and vertere (to turn). Originally, ‘conversation’ signified a process of ‘turning with’ others toward and through shared experience.”7 I think that the walk and talk is the perfect simple opportunity for a shared experience with others. To be in conversation on a walk is to enact on the word “conversation” in the truest form…or whatever. I saw a source when I was looking for material for another essay I’m writing about unsocial sociability, currently titled When Should We Shut The Fuck Up?, and I found a source proving that a conversation circle (you know, when you’re at a social gathering hanging out and everyone’s standing around talking and somehow you all start to form a circle), that doesn’t work with more than 5 people. Then it becomes one person giving a speech to a crowd, not everyone can participate equally, and the chances of 2 people breaking off into their own conversation becomes too high. This source didn’t fit well into that essay so I omitted it, but I think similar rules apply with the walk and talk. With two it’s perfect. Three...well...we all know what happens when 3 people try to walk down the street together, one always gets left behind. A group of 4 walk and talk works as well, I think it’s safe to say only even numbers work for this concept because it’s that one-on-one time where you can establish a mutual sentiment.
Greer recalls Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse with a quote: “That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them”8
This made me think of In the Mood for Love (2000), the film by Wong Kar-wai. The story follows next-door apartment neighbors, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung). Chow and Su notice their respective partners are always out of town at the same time and they soon realize their spouses are having an affair with each other. Chow and Su live among nosy neighbors and sneak away to spend time together; they grieve together, they try to understand the affair together, and eventually, they fall in love. The film is hauntingly quiet, despite its impeccable score & soundtrack, romanticism and yearning lurks between Chow and Su.
Unlike their spouses, they’re not having an affair in the traditional sense, but the tension between them builds in their stolen moments together, walking, talking walking in silence, and even just passing each other in a tight corridor. (ugh, it reminds me of when in school you’d pass by the person you had a crush on, and you’d get all tingly inside, ooof. that’s good stuff.) If you’re still in the early stages of dating, on a walk and talk there’s the glorious and butterfly-inducing potential for touch; one hand brushing the other’s, shoulder bumping, hand-to-body contact to call attention to the dead rat on the sidewalk, what have you. The moments in In the Mood for Love where they almost touch are so weighted, so filled with romance and angst. They refuse to be like their partners and succumb to adultery but “this only turns up the temperature between them; sometimes nothing is more erotic than repression.”9 If you’re trying not to bone10 right away, instead of a cold shower you can always just take a walk.
Your walk and talk might not be that of the walk and talk of The Worst Person in the World, where the main character “Julie suddenly ‘freezes’ the entire city so she can sidestep the clock-bound world and spend time with Eivind.”11 But maybe amid the conversation, you’ll be spellbound and it might feel like time has stopped and the city is frozen in place.
I recently watched a walk and talk scene in Nancy Meyer’s film Something’s Gotta Give staring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Erica (Keaton) has nothing but disdain for Harry (Nicholson), the 63-year-old man dating her late-20s daughter, but it’s when he and Erica go on a walk along the beach outside of Erica’s Hamptons house that she sees a different side of him. As they pick up rocks, talk, and laugh, Erica sees his “soulfulness” and eventually Erica’s daughter breaks up with Harry so that he can date her mom (the movie is weird. Harry and the daughter only went on a couple of dates and were “not even close” to having sex, so I guess that makes it all okay, idk).
When we walk, our bodies are doing a multitude of things at once, the walk and talk gives your body another thing to do with your partner that isn’t sex. I think with every step the connection is built upon. Those moments on the walk and talk when you’re not looking at each other, make the moments you do catch the other’s eye even more special. When looking into the analysis of walking itself Katy Ferguson, author of “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”, found that when walking “we fall ourselves forward,”12 and sometimes we actually do fall. But that doesn’t stop us from walking, right? (the subtext here is about love, duh) Adding a walk and talk as a nice little topper to your next date might just take you from basic ol’ “falling forward” to primo-level falling in love.
Ferguson, Kathy E. “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking.” Political Research Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 708–19. Page 709 http://www.jstor.org/stable/26384810.
Ferguson, 709
Van den Berg, A.E. and Beute, F. (2021) ‘Walk it off! The effectiveness of walk and talk coaching in nature for individuals with burnout- and stress-related complaints’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 76, p. 101641. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101641.
Dunn, J. (2023) ‘The Beauty of a “Walk and Talk”’, The New York Times, 9 June. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/well/move/walk-talk-social-connections-conversation.html
Golan, Yael, Jason Henderson, Nancy Lee Wilkinson, and Aiko Weverka. “Gendered Walkability: Building a Daytime Walkability Index for Women.” Journal of Transport and Land Use 12, no. 1 (2019): 501–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26911279.
Virginia Woolf, WALTER SICKERT A CONVERSATION
Greer, Erin. “‘A Many-Sided Substance’: The Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant.” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (2017): 1–17. Page 3 https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.40.3.01.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Page 22 New York: Harvest Books, 1989. Print.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2494-in-the-mood-for-love-haunted-heart
Slang for sexual intercourse
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7844-the-worst-person-in-the-world-lost-and-found
Ferguson, 709