Comedians Atul Khatri and Kiran Deol discuss why the debrief is the ultimate love language between friends

Atul Khatri: My wife is the same. When she’s telling me a story, she loves to go all over the place. If she’s talking about a party, she’ll say, “You know, I met that lady, do you remember her husband? She’s got two children, one of them is studying at Stanford.” I have to keep reminding her to come back to the story. As a comedian, I’ve learnt to only include essential details in an anecdote. I keep asking her, “What’s the punch? When is the punch coming? If you had dinner, did you break a table? Did somebody run away without paying the bill?” But there are no punches: just one premise after the other.

KD: When I debrief with my girlfriends, I want to hear it as if I were there. Give me all the details so I feel like I was next to you.

AK: My male friends and I are more curt and to the point. To be honest, even if I wanted to share more details with them, I don’t think they’d be interested.

KD: It’s the same with my male friends. Recently, one of them had a surprise party thrown for him. I told him, “Tell me all about it.” He said, “It was crazy, I’ll just send you pictures and you can look at them.” I was so confused.

AK: On the other hand, I’ve sometimes seen guys discuss a single over in a cricket match for hours. How the ball swung, if the pitch was wet­—they can go on and on.

KD: Maybe people care so much about ball games because they need that win. Men are discouraged from expressing anything except anger, so that’s how they channel all of their angst or the fact that their fathers didn’t demonstrate love. It’s something safe that they can put all their energy into. It lets them escape their own lives. Women, on the other hand, encourage each other to be vulnerable and feel their feelings.

AK: As a man, I can never show my weak side while talking to other men. It’s not easy to be vulnerable or admit our mistakes. Recently, an influencer friend got scammed, and when he talked about it publicly, women were far more empathetic. Most people trolling him in the comments were men; many claimed he was lying for attention.