Gossip tells everyone exactly how you’ll talk about them next.

Everyone in the conversation runs the same quiet arithmetic. If you will say this about someone who is not here, you will say something about them when they are not here, and how funny it was does not cancel the calculation. That is a large part of why close friendships rarely get built on it.

When the talk turns toward somebody absent this week, try being the person who adds nothing. No lecture, just a change of subject. People remember who stayed out of it much longer than they remember what got said.