RELATIONSHIPS: Intimate strangers

It happened to Susan Schroeder once, in a hospital waiting room in St. Paul. Susan Schempf, of St. Francis, was in the deli line at the grocery store. And Patti Oberle, of Minneapolis, says it happens to her all the time when flying.

In an instant, without warning, the three women were sucked into strangers' deeply personal lives.

Infidelity. Grief. Custody battles. Doesn't matter the subject. Sometimes, as they learned, it's just easier to share fears, anger, confusion, even dreams, with someone you'll never see again.

"It's spontaneous, not thought out," said Twin Cities marriage and family therapist Brier Miller. But even Miller notices the paradox: That anonymity allows us to truly be ourselves. "The person who is listening is not a real player in your life. You can be whoever you want to be at the moment."

For the most part, Miller said, self-disclosure is a good thing. You can speak without being judged; a fresh listener might offer a new way to tackle a problem, or persuade you that it's not really a problem at all.

"It's freeing to be outside a role, and we don't usually get to do that," Miller said. "Genuine friendships start on planes."

Maybe that's why some flight attendants call the phenomenon "jump-seat therapy." But such "therapy" can, and often does, occur on trains, buses, in grocery lanes and, of course, on the Internet.

STEP RIGHT UP

The world seems to be divided into two types of people: those who are horrified to share anything but honey-roasted peanuts with a seatmate, and those who must be wearing a button that says: "Tell me everything!"

"I asked some colleagues at dinner the other night if this ever happened to them, and they looked at me very strangely," said Oberle, 41, who travels on business four to five times a week. "They say they don't talk to people on planes."

Schempf, 50, has been drawn into conversations in bars, bathrooms, at weddings and in buffet lines at restaurants. She was at the deli counter when she found herself swept into the life of a young single father. He told her how he gained custody of his child. He told her the history of the child's mother. "He wanted to tell me more, but my roast turkey was sliced and it was time to leave."

Schempf has no idea what makes people want to tell her things. Her 22-year-old daughter, Holly, laughs at how frequently this happens to her mother. Holly thinks it's because her mom acknowledges people, makes eye contact. Now Holly's starting to acknowledge people, too, says Schempf.

HE TOLD YOU WHAT?

Custody battles are just the beginning of it.

"It is amazing what people will talk about to total strangers," said Oberle, a self-described "chatterbox." She finds herself in all sorts of riveting conversations - and some that are not so riveting.

"One time, a guy sitting next to me was all excited about his weekend with his mistress. He proceeded to tell me all about it, more than I wanted to know, and how he was going to tell his wife that he's going to leave her. I could hardly listen to it."

The best conversations, she admits, are those going on in the row behind you, where you get to hear everything without having to be involved. Oberle's husband, Paul Cullen, 42, also travels on business. He remembers an older man and younger woman one row back, "divulging every aspect of their personal lives and Internet dating experiences." Definitely better than an in-flight film.

Kelly Fine, 30, was on a cross-country bus ride more than a decade ago when a college student sitting next to her confessed that he had, in record time, developed a crush on her. "He had a longtime girlfriend back home, so he expressed a lot of guilt," Fine said. "I encouraged him to talk. He talked about his life, his manic-depression, his identification with Holden Caulfield of `The Catcher in the Rye,' and how sorry he was that he felt more excited to meet me than to return home to his girlfriend."

They held hands and exchanged addresses.

"At the time, I assumed he was on the verge of breaking up with his girlfriend," Fine said. "Now, I think he might have had a strong relationship with her and he was trying to solve a question that day: `Can this be love if sometimes I wish I was dating someone else?'-"

She'll probably never know. She wrote to him once or twice, but he never wrote back. Schroeder of South St. Paul was in a hospital waiting room about a month ago when some other women began "husband-bashing."

She didn't like it. And she noticed that another woman, in her 70s, didn't like it, either. She leaned over and told the woman, "I'm out of this. I love my husband." The older woman told Schroeder how much she missed her husband, who died five years ago after many decades of marriage. "She looked at me and her eyes welled up with tears," Schroeder said. "She told me she had tried to kill herself with pills because she was so sad without him." But the sadder days were behind her now, she told Schroeder. She found a little job and is enjoying life. Schroeder thanked her for sharing her story, then reached over to hold her hand. "It was so weird," Schroeder said. "Just when I reached out, I heard my mom's name called and it was time to go."

LINKED BY THE WEB

It's doubtful there's any place offering easier access for intimate strangers to connect than the Internet. And while known more for being a land of longing and lies, the Web can be also be life-affirming and honest.

About 10 years ago, Sue McCloughan of Plymouth linked herself to seven other women who were also wondering how to get preteen boys to take a shower, among many parenting issues. The women hailed from as near as Burnsville and as far away as Seattle, San Diego, Albany, N.Y., and New York City. They called themselves "puberty loop."

"Long before any of us were willing to trust the others enough to tell where we lived, we were willing to confess deepest secrets," said McCloughan. Quickly, the e-mails shifted from parenting to personal problems; a secret story of sexual abuse, a child put up for adoption. "Even more important were the little things that we never could have explained to a friend or husband - irrational worries, trivial but trying spousal irritations."

Then one of the moms got cancer. They met for the first time in Kansas City, one week before she died. "In a strange way, we had a very nice time," McCloughan said. They still check in on her children, now grown, and talk with each other every day. "Oddly," McCloughan said, "sharing secrets with strangers made us very, very close."

STRANGER DANGER, THE ADULT VERSION

Still, such connections come with a warning. Some are comical, like blurting out something as your airliner is about to land, then hearing the pilot announce that bad weather requires circling the airport for 30 more minutes. Oberle is getting more careful about what she shares as she begins to see the same people week after week boarding her planes.

But it's even more dicey to believe that sharing with a stranger is enough; problems can be postponed, but they can't be resolved, therapists say, until key players are invited into the conversation.

Talking to strangers "gives us the illusion of intimacy, without any of the substance of intimacy," said family therapist Judy Watson Tiesel. It's a "relief valve" for our anxieties, which doesn't address what needs repairing at the heart of a relationship. "Jump-seat therapy," she said, "is the fast food of relationship nutrition: empty calories!"

Miller agrees that free advice is worth the price. But she still encourages people to reach out when they can.

"As family therapists, we really value relationships," Miller said. "I support people having intimate moments where we have a chance to reflect. If you have that chance, go for it."

Besides, you just never know whom you might meet.

Tom Lee of Hopkins was on a flight from Denver to Minneapolis in about 1993 when a young guy in jeans and a T-shirt sat down across the aisle.

They talked business for quite some time, enjoying each other's company. The guy made some passing mention about being "in the computer business," Lee said. As they walked down the ramp after landing, the guy gave Lee his card and said: "Give me a call when you're in Seattle. I'd like to hear more of those stories."

The guy's name?

Steve Jobs.

Gail Rosenblum - 612-673-7350