DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Without diving too deep into the details, I had a really tough upbringing, marked by a lot of neglect from different sources. Naturally, this took a toll on my confidence and self-esteem. I used to walk with my head down, barely able to speak to anyone, and this lasted for quite some time. Over the years, I’ve managed to come out of my shell, but I often found myself gravitating towards, or attracting, toxic people. In my late twenties, I was stuck living with people I didn’t want to be around, unemployed for two years, dealing with some health issues, and barely in touch with anyone. This was compounded by the pandemic, and I was in therapy again — though the therapists I had at the time weren’t particularly helpful.��In the last couple of years, things have improved for me. I’ve done a lot of cool things, met tons of new people, got my career in order, and found a really good therapist. Overall, I’m feeling better about myself. I’m still a work in progress, but at least I’m functioning. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t going out and meeting people before, but it’s like things have clicked this time around.��That said, I still feel a significant disconnect in my relationships, and this is where things get confusing for me.��Starting with the negatives: Despite attending a lot of social events, I realize I’m really bad at making new connections. I don’t understand the dynamics of meeting people at bars, parties, concerts, conventions, etc., and more often than not, I leave these events without having spoken to anyone. I know this is just part of life, but it’s hard not to feel hurt when I see people chatting easily or when there’s someone attractive across the room. It feels like I’m watching a world I can’t access through a glass window.��I’m also aware that I can come across as arrogant or aloof when I first meet someone. This is made worse by my tone of voice and dry, sarcastic sense of humor. It doesn’t happen every time, as you’ll see later, but it’s frequent enough that I want to address it. For example, when I started a new job a few years ago, I thought the introductions went well. My work performance was praised, and I got along with my team. However, when I went out for drinks with a colleague a few months in, he mentioned that the entire team initially thought I was “a bit of a dick” when they first met me. I eventually left that job, and they seemed sad to see me go, but that one comment still makes me anxious, especially since I started a new job two weeks ago and worry that I might not have made the best first impression. It doesn’t help that I tend to “focus on my work” and “do my own thing” (though I do consider myself a team player and always offer help).��Since this is generally a dating advice blog, I’ll also mention that despite the improvements in my life, I haven’t been on any dates or had anyone show interest in me, although most people assume I’m taken.��Lastly, I struggle with small talk and don’t really open up to people. I can’t relate to family occasions, birthdays, and the like because they weren’t a big part of my life. I can’t relate to relationships either, as it’s been a long time since I’ve been in one, and I’m not even sure what “love” is supposed to feel like. While I can share experiences, like visiting new places, I have trouble conveying them in a way that shows enthusiasm or enjoyment.��This negativity could all be in my head, especially since it’s harder to make new connections as you get older, and I haven’t been in one place long enough to build better relationships at work. Still, I feel like there’s room for improvement.��On the other hand — and here’s the irony — I’m actually pretty good at making new connections. I’m an ambivert, comfortable talking to new people, making them laugh, and helping them feel at ease. I’m usually the one organizing social events, and I participate in two sports regularly and dance, which has helped me build friendships of varying closeness. I have a few people who regularly message me, send memes, etc., and I’ve been invited out to different events recently, including drinks with just one person, so clearly, there’s some level of interest in connecting with me. I’ve also been told I’m attractive and charming, so I must be doing something right!��So, I’m not entirely sure what my issue is. Do I excel in some situations but not others? Am I misinterpreting my actions? Am I taking other people’s disinterest too personally? Do I come across as too confident or self-assured, making people think I don’t have time for them? Could I be giving off negative energy and pushing people away, possibly as a consequence of my past experiences?��I talk to my therapist about this and trust his guidance, but I’d appreciate a second opinion.��Maybe you can help me figure out this enigma.
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Two Step Forwards, Two Steps Back
DEAR TWO STEPS FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK: The first thing I think that needs to be acknowledged is that the pandemic has f--ked people up in a lot of ways that we haven’t even begun to fully wrap our heads around, never mind process. The sheer level of psychic damage that everyone took was immense – if unevenly distributed – and I think more people need to give themselves a break for how much it set folks back.
(There was a lot of jokey-jokes about how everyone went fully feral during lockdown and in the aftermath and I think people are still only starting to realize that those weren’t jokes.)
So I think you should have a measure of grace for yourself regarding the ways that the pandemic and its associated issues affected your social development and general mental health and well-being. I think you should also remember that the important part of being a work-in-progress is the progress. Slow progress is still progress and it’s important to recognize that. So I think you should give yourself credit for how far you’ve come and how much you’ve accomplished, despite the speedbumps you’ve run into.
Now I suspect that part of the problem you’re running into is a combination of your past trauma, defense mechanisms that’ve outlasted their usefulness, and inexperience. One of the things that happens to a lot of people who grow up with a high level of parental or social neglect is that they more or less become self-sufficient in an unhealthy way and that ends up hindering their social skills. It makes sense, in a perverse sort of way; if you learn that your needs are never going to be met by the people who are supposed to love and care for you, you often respond by trying to not have needs. So a lot of social neglect can often lead to someone trying to eliminate their need to be social at all beyond what’s absolutely necessary.
And therein lies the challenge, once you realize that this is unhealthy and it needs to change. It’s become less of a method of protection and more of a routine that you’ve become accustomed to, and you have to shift your relationship to it. It helps, I think, to think of it like going through physical therapy after a serious injury or trying to rehab a weakened or damaged limb. Social skills, like all skills, are like muscles. They get stronger through use. But if you don’t use them, they atrophy and you have to work harder to build them up. Much like an athlete who’s been forced into bedrest and inactivity because of an injury, first they have to rehabilitate themselves back to a baseline before they can start getting to where they were.
And if you’re not someone who really had that baseline to begin with? Well, then it feels even harder because you’re not entirely sure where that baseline is. Hence what I said about inexperience; you’re basically trying to learn the rules of the game while playing it and wondering why it feels so clunky and difficult. It also means that you tend to get way too lost in your own head and overthink things.
The metaphorical “glass window” at parties and social events is a great example. If you’ll forgive an awkward comparison, this is a little like watching a dog that’s convinced that the door is closed and it can’t go through, even as people and other pets walk through without issue. There’s no window, no barrier except the one in your mind. Because here’s the thing: the dynamics of talking to people at social events – bars, parties, concerts, cons, whatever – are honestly not different from meeting people anywhere else. You start conversations. That’s it.
You already know you can do this – you say yourself that you’re comfortable with talking to new people and making connections. You already have the skills, the knowledge and even the practice to do it. It just feels different because in your head, you’ve convinced yourself that the “rules” here are different… somehow. But honestly, the only real difference is the importance you’ve put on it. It’s easy to talk to people when there’re no stakes. It’s a lot harder when you feel like it’s something you’re supposed to do or “should” do, in part because in your head it’s become something you can fail at and your brain has convinced you that failure will come with consequences.
But this is also why the key is to force yourself to do it anyway, to risk failure and realize that no, there really aren’t any dangers to this. If we return to the awkward metaphor, it’s a little like pushing that dog through the open door and showing that there’s no barrier there. It can see other people doing it, but until it experiences this itself, it still perceives the barrier and is held back by it. Once it goes through, it can tell the difference and isn’t “stuck” any longer.
One of the ways that you can make this challenge easier on yourself is to lower what you’re asking of yourself in those moments. You don’t need to expect to go to these events hoping to meet the love of your life or your new best friend or the business partner who’s going to help you conquer your chosen industry; you should set your challenge as “I’m going to talk to three people.” The conversations don’t need to be long or in depth; it’s great if they are, but they don’t need to be. It just simply needs to be more than a “hi… well… bye!” Once you start getting acclimated to the idea that talking to people at parties or what-not isn’t different from talking to people on other occasions when the stakes don’t feel so high, the rest starts coming much easier.
The issue about making small talk or not knowing how to relate to people is, likewise, simply about experience and familiarity. Part of why people struggle with small talk is that they misunderstand the point of small talk. A lot of people, especially the “I find small talk tedious, let’s talk about the important, meaningful things” crowd, fail to understand why we make small talk in the first place. Small talk is, at its core, the art of finding initial commonalities. Even something seemingly as banal as talking about the weather is an attempt at establishing a sort of consensus – “ah, we both feel the same about this topic.” This person is a stranger or someone you haven’t seen in a while, so part of what you’re doing are finding the places where you’re similar and can relate to one another. After all, Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat aside, opposites don’t attract; we’re far more drawn to people who are similar to us. Those similarities may be immediate and obvious or they may be subtle, but the more we share, the easier it is to relax and open up around them. And that relaxation is precisely what makes it possible to start talking about those more meaningful, important topics. It’s the on-ramp to the social highway, if you will, allowing you to merge into traffic without causing a ten car pile-up.
One of the easiest ways to make small talk easier is simply to be curious about people and see what makes them tick. Talking to them, asking about their day… all of this is simply about getting to know them, getting a baseline for who they are and finding the areas where you overlap and where you differ and how that overlap looks. You may not, for example, be able to relate to the ins and outs of a high-powered trial lawyer’s job, but you’ve almost certainly had stressful meetings or dealt with the headaches of trying to organize around a project that just keeps throwing curveballs and unexpected obstacles in your way. You may not have the exact same experiences, but you have ones that are similar or even universal. Everyone’s had slacker co-workers or overly-involved middle-managers, ignorant bosses and clients and the like.
This is why I like the “think like a pirate” style of conversational volleyball: “ARR” or “ask, relate, return”. That is, you ask questions, find a way of relating to it and understanding it, then return the topic with a related question based on what they said. An example might be:
“How’s work been?”
“Oh, it’s been a nightmare, corporate just decided we all need to use this new ‘efficiency’ software and it’s thrown everything into chaos while we try to figure it out.”
“Oh Christ, yeah, I remember when my last job switched our payroll service and we had to make sure we gleepfargled the 1090 or something. How are you all handling it?”
Now, one thing to realize is that sometimes you don’t need to relate to the exact same thing; some things are outside of your experience. But if it is, then the key is just to lean into that inexperience and focus on what it would be like for them. I’ve never been skydiving, so I can’t necessarily relate directly to someone throwing themselves out of a perfectly good airplane. But I can relate to some of the feelings I would expect from that and use that as a contrast: “wow, that’s incredible! I don’t think I could do that, they’d need to literally push me out of the door. Did you have a hard time making that first step or was it easy for you?”
Again, the key when it’s something you haven’t experienced yourself is just curiosity – what’s it like, what made them decide to do it, how did they feel afterwards, and so on. That curiosity and interest about them is also going to make them more likely to appreciate you. After all, most of the time, we encounter people who aren’t listening, so much as waiting for their turn to talk. Asking questions and actually listening to their replies is very much a gift that you’re giving them.
Now as for how you’re coming off to others… I suspect some of it is that “dryness” you talk about. A dry sense of humor is hard to pull off and a lot of folks who think they have one often don’t realize that they’re coming off like a dick rather than as a wit. Part of it is simply that if folks don’t know you well enough to be able to tell what’s a joke and what’s not, they’re going to rely on other clues like tonality. If you sound more or less the same as you would otherwise, they’re going to assume you’re serious, not joking. So even if you think what you’re saying is so self-evidently absurd, if you say it in the same tone of voice that you would discuss something serious, folks who don’t know you will have every reason to think you’re not joking. God knows the last ten years have left us in a place where people are willing to say screamingly absurd things that they take very seriously.
The other aspect of dry, sarcastic humor is that you have to be very good at it. Otherwise, it’s as John Scalzi famously said: the fail state of “clever” is “asshole”.
That, I suspect, combined with your tendency towards being as little stand-offish is part of why folks don’t think of you as a “team player”. Yeah, you offer to help, but I’m guessing you tend to be a “head down, do the work, go home” kind of guy most of the time and that can create a particular impression. Being a little more active and social – especially with a more expressiveness – would help ease that feeling.
The thing to keep in mind is that as daunting and overwhelming as I’m sure all this feels in the moment, the main reason it feels uncomfortable and strange to you is that it’s just unfamiliar. You already know you have the raw skills needed to connect with people. You are 90% of the way there already. The big thing you just need to do now is to put it into practice. If you lower the stakes in your mind and give yourself permission to take baby steps and make small changes and see what happens, it becomes far less intimidating and much easier to simply ease into it. As with any skill, the more you put your social skills into use, the more proficient you’ll be come and the less daunting or awkward those situations will feel.
Good luck.
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com