Nobody asks about my favorite dinosaur anymore

When you were six, making a friend took one question. You walked up to someone at recess and asked what their favorite dinosaur was, and that was it, you were friends. If they said the same one as you, great. If they said a different one, also great, because either way you both liked dinosaurs.

Maybe it wasn’t dinosaurs. Maybe it was Pokémon, or a favorite color, or which superhero you’d rather be. The specific question doesn’t matter much, and I suspect that’s the interesting part: it was one simple question, whichever one it happened to be, and it worked.

Kids are simple

Asking told them you liked dinosaurs. Them not walking away told you they liked dinosaurs. That was the whole thing, and everything after it was two people who agreed about something, enjoying it.

None of that should have been enough to make a friend. It was anyway. I don’t think it’s because the question was clever. I think it’s because you were six.

A six-year-old isn’t hiding much. What they like is most of what there is to know about them, and they’ll tell you all of it immediately, unprompted, and at length. They’re probably wearing it, too. Liking dinosaurs is most of a six-year-old’s personality, so matching on it was all you needed.

But you are not six. When you find out that a stranger likes the same thing you like, you have found one thing. That is the same overlap you had at recess: exactly one item wide. What’s different is that you are not one item wide anymore.

There is no adult version

Some people go looking for a version of this question for grown-ups. The adult opener, the one that does what that one did, but I don’t think it exists.

What you want hasn’t changed. You want what you got at recess: somebody who knows what you’re like and is glad about it. What changed is how much ground that covers.

At six, you were one thing you liked. Now you are all the things you like, and also all the things you don’t, which is a category you barely had back then. Nobody at recess bonded over what they hated, because nobody had enough of a record to hate much of anything.

Music, food, film, books. The ones you love and the ones you can’t sit through, and your opinion of the ones they named. Then the things further in: politics, human rights, what you think people owe each other.

You want to connect on all of it, but you will settle for most. Every one of those is its own question, and no clever single question stands in for the rest.

It only feels like a loss

I understand being nostalgic of simpler times. Missing the dinosaur question is missing being six.

At six, the question was a door you walked through, and the friendship was on the other side of it. Now the questions are the room. Getting to know somebody isn’t the thing standing in front of the friendship, it’s the whole of it, and it doesn’t finish, because neither of you stops changing.

Enjoying the process

The twenty, forty, sixty, maybe a hundred questions are the friendship. The skill left to learn is wanting to ask them, and enjoying the process. Liking the second one, and the ninth, and the one that finally explains something you’d been getting wrong about somebody for a year. Taking the long way on purpose, because the long way is where the person is.

Nobody has asked me about my favorite dinosaur in a very long time. I don’t expect anyone to. So I’ll go first.

What’s your favorite dinosaur?

That’s question one.