Do you enjoy the silence?

How do you feel about silence and pauses in the conversation when you are hanging out with friends or acquaintances? Do you feel the need to fill in all the gaps? Do they make you anxious or uneasy? Or do you enjoy silence in the presence of others sometimes?

During this and my previous stay in Paris, I’ve noticed that people who grew up here seem to have horror of silences in conversation. Last night at a bar, I was asked a number of times if I was “bored,” just because I happened to be in a pensive mood and was more inclined to listen and observe rather than speak and crack jokes every ten seconds. And the people I was hanging out with seemed downright uneasy and almost embarrassed when we hit the end of a conversational trail and we didn’t have anything to talk about for a moment.

I prefer being able to enjoy silence in the presence of other people, and speaking when I am moved to do so, not because I feel that a social situation requires it. But I’m thinking this is a cultural thing as well as an introversion thing!