Ending Kindly, And The Awkwardness Only You Remember

How you leave is most of what gets kept.

Endings are botched more often than openings and matter more. The common failure is drifting: energy drops, both people sense it, neither wants to be the one who leaves, and so the conversation dies slowly in front of you both until someone escapes on a technicality. It leaves a residue. A clean ending does the opposite, and it has two parts. Name that you are going, plainly and without a manufactured excuse, and then say something specific about what you are taking away. The specificity is the kind part. It tells them which bit of the last half hour actually reached you.

This works because the fear underneath most awkward endings is that the other person will read the exit as a verdict on them. Removing that reading is straightforward. Saying that you should go and find the person you came with, and that you are going to look up the thing they mentioned, closes the conversation and confirms that it was worth having. It also leaves the door open for a next time without requiring either of you to promise anything. Elaborate exits do the reverse: the longer the excuse, the more it sounds like one, which is the only situation where more words hurt.

One last thing, for anyone who replays conversations on the way home. The awkward moment you are still holding was almost certainly not registered by the other person at anything like the same volume. They were busy managing their own turn, their own pauses and their own exit, and the pause you found excruciating was, from where they sat, a pause. This is not a reason to stop caring how you talk with people. It is a reason to be considerably gentler with yourself about the last one, and a little braver about the next, which is roughly the whole argument of this magazine.