Robert Young arrived early on a Tuesday morning to meet his stranger at a cafe in Cumberland, B.C. “Find a seat,” he told his guide dog, Curly.
Mr. Young is blind, which, he says, makes it tricky enough to find someone you actually know in a restaurant; locating someone you’ve never met is even harder.
So he was already waiting at Curly’s chosen table, when Emily Osborne walked in and spotted an older man with a black Labrador retriever settled at his feet.
The pair had been matched on a website called Comox Valley Coffee and Conservation that connects people who would otherwise likely never have a one-hour, face-to-face chat.
Ms. Osborne, a 34-year-old travel adviser and Mr. Young, a 70-year-old retiree who lost his eyesight to glaucoma, fit the description of an unlikely coffee-talk duo.
Yet within minutes, Ms. Osborne was describing her trail run the previous July weekend, and Mr. Young was regaling her with stories from his years coaching long-distance runners. They discovered a shared love of dogs. Both relative newcomers to the small village on the east coast of Vancouver Island, they realized they actually lived on the same street.
Ms. Osborne left for work, buzzing, as she described it, with a sense of connection. Over the summer, she met seven strangers for early morning coffee. Each time, she says, “it feels like it kicks off my day on a high note.”
Illustration by LeeAndra Cianci
It’s a telling indicator of these disconnected, increasingly lonely times, that we’re now booking coffee with random strangers the way we’d schedule a yoga class.
And yet, if we wanted to chat more with the friendly woman in the grocery line, study after study suggest, we’d only have to ask. In real life, strangers are far less dangerous, significantly more honest and much happier to chat with us than we believe – and than crime TV and social media suggest.
Instead, we pass each other by, eyes averted, heads crooked toward screens, missing out on the everyday greetings and more meaningful interactions that boost well-being and create safer, more caring communities.
Talking to strangers is so healthy for humanity that a growing number of places have started campaigns, events and programs to kickstart those conversations. Next month, for instance, national Talk To a Stranger Week will challenge Canadians to get more chatty on the bus, at the dog park, in passing on the street – a public awareness campaign started four years ago by Genwell, a Toronto-based, non-profit group working to reduce loneliness by fostering human connection. Medicine Hat, Alta., proclaimed its first Good Neighbour Day on Oct. 2. And this past summer, two residents in Montreal’s Nôtre-Dame-de-Grâce area took the challenge on themselves, playing host to weekly Neighbour Nights on their street.
Around the world, there’s a sense that humanity generally needs a neighbourly tune-up. In Sweden, the northern city of Lulea created Sag hej! to prompt citizens to say hello. Australia now has Say G’day Day. In November, Fédération Française pour les lien sociaux (the French Federation for Social Connections) launches the first national “Semaine des liens” – a week of connection partly inspired by the Canadian example, says the federation’s co-founder and executive director Arnaud Goulliart.
The Comox Valley Coffee and Conversations were started by tech entrepreneur Maxine Cunningham, CEO and founder of Pick My Brain, a global online marketplace where people connect to buy, sell or gift their knowledge.
Illustration by LeeAndra Cianci
After moving to area in 2021, Ms. Cunningham wanted to find a way to connect in person with interesting people. In June, with her partner Marie-Clo, a singer-songwriter who’d also relocated to Comox, she launched a local, in-person version of her company’s virtual model. For $100 – a cost that covers creating and operating the platform, and, Ms. Cunningham says, ideally incentivizes people to follow-through – participants are matched to ten strangers for in-person coffee chats, much like a dating app. On their profiles, they can choose to list the type of people they want to meet, the topic they’d like to discuss, and the cafes where they’d prefer to meet.
So far, 133 people in Comox Valley have had 425 conversations, Ms. Cunningham says, with another 312 names on a waiting list. This month, with the help of local co-ordinators, Ms. Cunningham’s company will launch similar websites in Nova Scotia and Nanaimo, and another one Australia, that is both in-person and virtual. Ms. Cunningham hopes to keep expanding her business model to get people talking all around the world. “Conversation is the new currency,” she says.
Ms. Osborne, who moved to Comox Valley two years ago, signed up because a one-hour coffee with a stranger felt like low stakes with potentially high rewards. “I figured it would probably attract some interesting characters,” she says, “and I’d be excited to hear their stories.” She’s met entrepreneurs, artists and retired people, meeting mostly in the morning before starting work – and left each one, she says, inspired and upbeat.
Vivian Vaillant, 50, who works remotely, saw the coffee matches as motivation to step away from her desk. “It’s a chance to ask another human being, ‘what’s life like for you right now?’” she says. Not because you want something from them. Just because you’re curious.
One stranger started the discussion by praising a local politician that Ms. Vaillant dislikes. “My choices are to tune out, walk away or lean in,” she says. “I signed up to have coffee. I don’t get to scroll to the next thing that I’d rather read.” She decided to listen without debating, to use the experience to reflect on her own biases. In the end, she says, her opinion didn’t change, but it was softened hearing someone else’s enthusiastic perspective.
For Phillippe Duprey, a 41-year-old father of three, the conversations have ranged from a two-hour debate about the risks of AI to sharing parenting challenges with another dad. “The trick is to stay open and let the discussion blossom,” he says. “Then it’s just like wandering down a lovely path with a friend.”
Ms. Cunningham emphasizes, however, that the coffee conversations are meant to be no-strings-attached moment of connection, not friendships. She doesn’t track what happens after the first meeting, she knows half a dozen people who have met up a second time. One woman has invited all her coffee matches to dinner.
Ms. Osborne and Mr. Young have not had coffee since they met this summer. But now when Ms. Osborne runs past Mr. Young on their street, he recognizes her greeting. They’ve met up by chance and walked their dogs together.
“It opens up this whole new perspective on your neighbourhood when you get to know the person down the street,” Ms. Osborne says.
Illustration by LeeAndra Cianci
And not just your neighbourhood, says Gillian Sandstrom, a Canadian researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, who conducts experiments to test how to make people more comfortable talking to people they don’t know.
As she recounts in her recent book, Once Upon a Stranger, Dr. Sandstrom was once so shy, she found it painful to draw any attention to herself. As part of her own research, she started asking a lot of random people “Whatcha doing?” She learned that asparagus can grow 25 centimetres in 24 hours from an English pub owner and once finagled herself an invitation to a book club.
Talking to strangers, she says, is a free and easy way to build social skills, to learn to how to start a conservation and actively listen, to see beyond first impressions, and live with the uncertainty that comes from not knowing how a story ends. When you’ll probably never see someone again, it’s easier to hear their opinion minus the emotion of a political debate with your dad. We also tend to be more receptive to a stranger’s advice, Dr. Sandstrom says; they’ll never know whether we followed it.
In her early studies, however, participants were hard to convince that strangers really did like talking to them; they believed positive encounters were outlier, were reluctant to try again. So for a follow-up experiment, she designed a week-long scavenger hunt and sent people out each day to talk to a someone wearing a hat, for example, or a stranger drinking coffee.
“Day by day, a little bit at a time, people were less worried about being rejected and felt more confident in their own conversational skills,” she says. Her published conclusion – that seven-days of practise was enough foster a habit – led to Canada’s week-long stranger-engagement campaign, says Pete Bombaci, the Founder of CEO of Genwell.
For those who still feel nervous, Dr. Sandstrom has analyzed three successful openers from her tracking her own interactions: ask a question, find something in common, or open with kindness. Other helpful props, according to studies, include puppies and statement t-shirts.
Don’t overthink it, says Mr. Young. “I’ve never really had any problem talking to people,” he says. “I got even better when I couldn’t see.” He can’t judge somebody’s appearance or overreact to an expression, and he’s learned to actively listen for a shift in tone that signals he’s perhaps been talking too much.
Most interactions with strangers will end where they begin. But not always. In 2015, at the end of a breastfeeding class in Saskatoon, Karla Combres stopped at the door, turned to the two dozen new moms not talking to each other, and asked: “Does anyone want to go for a walk?” Only one, Claire Miller, said, “Yes. I’ll join you.” That first walk led to playdates, dinners and girl’s trips, and supporting each other through trials and loss. Ms. Combres and Ms. Miller have been close friends for a more than a decade – because one stranger asked, and another answered.
Most of the conversations we have with strangers, Dr. Sandstrom says, are not “dazzling, life-changing moments” that lead to epiphanies or friendship. But maybe it’s relief to have everyday encounters that don’t beg to be posted to social media, that are just warm and easy enough to create that positive buzz Ms. Osborne describes.
“We’re all kind of faking it through life, making it up as we go,” says Ms. Combres. We may as well say hello.