What on Earth can we talk about?

It's called companionable silence.

Takes many years of practice

DH and I have been together for almost 55 years and we chat all the time, anything and everything is discussed. We talk about what so and so posted on FB, I tell him the funny anecdotes off GN. We talk about the family and the old days especially the history of our town as we are members of an Antiquarian society. News and TV programmes are discussed at length except for soaps and football which we watch on our own.

It's called companionable silence.
which is preferable to having a tiff

We talk about each other's interests, sometimes I can look a bit glazed but at other times it's quite interesting.

Yes it is companionable silence but funnily enough when I'm with lady friends/my sister we talk non stop. After all these years we know each views on everything and if anything crops up DH reminds me of a poem of Pam Ayres about her DH "wind him up and watch him go". DH taught for years and I think he's used to a captive audience and doesn't notice glazed eyes. . . .

As per harrigran and merlotgran we chat all the time but also collapse into the companionable silences especially since DH has discovered a computer game that he actually enjoys. The only thing about that wretched game is just how long it took him to find that it had a pause button!

I often have to repeat things about three times because he is not listening properly so that takes up quite a bit of time

We talk about family & friends, the news, politics, our future plans, TV, interesting things on the internet and our cats . Although, tbf, it's probably me talking for 75% of the time.

Jalima it isn’t that they aren’t listening, it’s because WE
Mumble,
Are in a different room ( like our house is so vast)
Have slightly turned our head away
HE has the telly on too loud
or that he wasn’t ready for me to speak!
Nothing to do with the fact that he has switched off.
We went to a friends for a meal this weekend, I went into the sitting room with his wife for a cosy chat, the DHs went on to the computer, my DH comes in later and says that the other DH had gone to sleep right in front of him and was still asleep! YES! Now he knows how it feels...

Politics (we often shout at the radio in unison). What we’ve just read in the paper. Plans for holidays and other social events. People we care about, especially if we are worried about them. How utterly amazing the dgc are.

We do both! Companionable silence and talking about anything and everything.

We volunteer (separately), I meet friends, DH goes to the football with DS1 so we have lots to talk about when we get together at dinner time. We chunter about the news, do the crossword, pass on any village gossip we may have gathered and we have a large family (and 2 cats!!) to talk about

maryeliza - we have amazing dgc too!

My late DH and I were together for over 45 years and never ran out of things to talk about.

Like others we do both. We can usually find something to chat about, today it's about the boiler which seems to have given up the ghost. We are waiting for someone, anyone, to call us back!

Oopsadaisy12, don’t forget ‘I didn’t know you were speaking to me’, that is rather than the other 50 people who live with us !
We have a mixture of chat about all sorts of things and also companiable silences.

We talk as much as we ever did (and that’s a lot). Especially as everything has to be repeated several times due to problems with hearing/short term memory/not listening in the first place.

We can spend most of the day in the same house with hardly a word passed, also when we are out in the car. Probably a lot of it is because we have had different groups of friends for years, different interests. He will talk for hours about the "old days" around this place if he can find someone to listen, I have no interest in it (don't call it home even though I've been here many years), fishing, horse racing, football. Also spends hours watching (often falling asleep) films etc on his laptop while wearing headphones.
Also play the hearing game, all the "what'd he say..." lol. So unless I can be bothered to practically shout or repeat everything at him I tend to not bother.

A mixture of all those for us. Some days we are quiet, other days there seem to be interesting items on the news or from our families. We have separate hobbies so must admit my eyes start to glaze over when he goes into the minutiae of how he has repaired one of his bikes. My conversation of course is interesting and not at all boring

We do have a lot of companionable silences. MyDH is quite a quiet man.
We both read th3 papers and find quite a lot to chat about in them.
Yesterday we noticed that the young boy who was abducted by his parents to have cancer treatment has got the all clear.
A young lady was upset because a cosmetics company didn’t want her to model for them. She has bad acne.
Meghan is getting babtised.
The best one was from Rod Liddles column. A soldier , after spending a lot of time and energy helping people in the snowy weather, was charged 50p when he asked to use a pub toilet.
Oh and pony riders have been warned that they mustn’t get too fat for their steeds!

We've been together 40 years and chat on and off all day about all sorts really not as much as with daughters or friends but its OK neither of us do small talk anyway.

We've been together since we were 15 so 49 years and have now lapsed into talking about the tv adverts, work, family, our cats or what we should be doing with our lives but can't decide. That sounds like we talk all the time but in reality don't say much to each other

We talk a lot about every day things. What to have for dinner, am I going to he park with him and the dog etc. But what drives me mad is when I ask him about something important to do with our future and he doesn't answer. I say "Well what do you say?" and, apparently, he's thinking about it. Later I realise that he never did answer me. Worse than that is when we have talked about something - just the two of us - and then the subject comes up when we are in company and he has a totally different opinion to his original one (or maybe he hadn't had an opinion before). This drives me mad!!

It's easy. We've been married 48 years. I talk and DH pretends to listen.

We talk about everything and anything, what's going on in the world, politics, people we know, the children, the grandchildren, books, films, travel, history, religion, all of it really. We enjoy reading The Sunday Times together, my husband inevitably reads out whole passages that I've already read, but that's okay. He plays golf three times a week and does like to run through the aftermath of that at times, I try to listen with feigned interest I'm afraid, that and his interest in sports per se is probably one of the few areas we don't have a shared interest. Some evenings we retire behind our different screens with headphones, me to catch up with something on I Player because I so often fall asleep at 9 pm and miss something I've wanted to see and him to watch golf videos on You Tube, but we are happy with our separate mutual differences, companionable silence as others have said. I remember reading or hearing an interview with Esther Rantzen who was widowed quite some time ago, when she stated "I've plenty of people to do something with, but lack a special person to do nothing with". Quite profound

DH is currently reading out the list of ingredients from soup recipes in the Guardian. As this includes recipes from Yotam Ottelenghi there’s been a lot of “Why the hell...?” and “What the hell....?”. It’s filled ten minutes. And no, I’ve no idea why they’re soaking their courgettes for 20 minutes or burning their aubergines over a naked flame (sounds like a recipe for disaster for a couple of old codgers).

DH has just spent 10 minutes explaining to me who it was he met down the town this morning (don't know them, 'you must do, they live in Road), all about the man's hip operation and how much better he can walk (very good) how, whilst they were chatting the man's ex-wife walked past and said a cheery 'good morning' (gosh), and another five minutes explaining exactly where they were when they had this conversation - surely you know where I mean (no).