Realy relate to this post a lot, I've always felt alone and a bit locked out socially and this totally matches with my own experience. There's a type of existensal despair that comes from knowing that you're unlikable but being unable to understand why you're percived as such. Olivia Laing book The Lonely City is pretty great but one of the interesting parts is the way she examines how a lot of people just instictivley blame lonely people as being responsible for their own plight and seem to ignore just how self-reinforcing it is; Social connection beget social connections, while people find it extremely unpleasant talking to someone who's alone or gives off lonely vibes.
It's just so bizzare how paradoxicaaly the only way to escape is to somehow ignore it exists, or something.
This was a beautiful read - it also really encapsulates the nebulous state of being likeable and how impossible it can be to get people to see you the way you see yourself, or conversely - see yourself how others see you.
I really liked this post! I was intrigued by the CHH lore about being unaccountably offputting in person and I thought this was a neat exploration of that, although I'm sure it's not fun to experience. And it's definitely true that adults like weird kids a lot more than their peers do.
It was an fascinating revelation halfway through that you didn't actually find other people individually very interesting. I wonder if that's changed over time? And also how much that was at the root of the other social problems (not claiming it was, I'd just be curious to run the experiment).
It has changed! I think I still have fairly high standards for what I consider interesting, I get bored very easily and that’s on me, but a big part of it was that I wasn’t asking people any questions, so I kind of just assumed they were boring!
I am horrified by that guidance counselor and her 'advice'. It does remind me of a situation where I went to the guidance counselor for advice when my daughter was in Kindergarten re: social situations in her classroom, to be told that "kids usually have their friend groups by now". IN KINDERGARTEN. Apparently she was behind already because she hadn't gone to the same preschool as the majority of kids/we didn't already know the parents socially. Needless to say we moved with no regrets a short while later.
This was an excellent post, thanks for writing it. What makes it more impactful to me is that I have so often been on the giving end of this phenomenon: I will very often identify someone as weird or annoying, decide I don't want to know them, and hold them at arm's length even if they try to get close (in fact, *especially* if they try to get close). I don't know why I do it, but I totally get it. The part of the story where the girl is walking to the bathroom with you and declines to talk about her favorite TV Show hits me perfectly... it's totally something I would do.
I’m not the one you’re replying to, but I’m similar. I had some bad experiences with people like that in elementary school (I was one of the few who would be nice to them but then they didn’t end up being particularly good friends - they were just desperate for someone to hang out with. A couple were actually really mean!)
Thanks for writing this ❤️ I relate so so much, especially the part about encountering these demons again as an adult and wondering if there’s something at your core that’s just not right 😢
This was moving to read. I relate to many parts of it, despite being pretty far removed from it. I was a boy who was never popular but that didn’t matter really because I always got along well with other nerds, and later arty people, despite being a bit shy. I also often find myself a bit obsessed with young loners, not because I was a loner myself, but because connection to friends was what really helped me get out of some negative spirals. But even though I’ve never been isolated it’s interesting how people seem to be able to smell on you whether you were popular in middle school.
I also found the stuff you wrote about how looks is more comprehensible than personality very interesting.
I also know what it’s like to be in the socially awkward club (which is no club at all), moving around from school to school every year in Montana, Canada, California and Alaska (not in that order). Something about me from my first days in kindergarten moved my peers often to physically attack me. My reaction (tactic?) was different than yours, though — to stay aloof, and to learn to outrun inevitable bullying gangs.
The experience taught me one thing, though. The constant American motto, wherever you go, is this: “Don’t be different. That bothers me. You better stop.”
The scars? At this point, with a small number of friends and a happy marriage (in which I do my part of the household chores and childcare), it’s simply to rather despise mainstream American ‘culture.’ (Perhaps I should want not to do this, but it’s there anyway.)
As it happens, our family lives a very non-standard life, and I do all I can to protect my offspring from the schools.
—
Also, I appreciate the ways you reach out in concern for lonely young people. Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere is being helped and encouraged.
Homeschooling, while generally harmless in the preschool/elementary age, has some extreme drawbacks in secondary school. My oldest (now 23) is still trying to catch up socially after being homeschooled K-12. My wife and I put our younger kids in school after realizing what a disaster homeschooling in Middle/High School was.
It's your decision, but I just wanted to put it out there that homeschool is not some kind of perfect solution. Plenty of things can go wrong with it.
One thing I appreciate about your post is that, from watching those fabled fedora-tipping guys, the way you tried to make friends is pretty much the way they try and fail at meeting women.
(Luckily for them, there's a universal script that works for making shallow male friendships - memorize a bunch of facts on some technical topic and argue with people about them.)
I sort of wondered if it was related to ADHD hyperactivity, but you couldn't bring that in up the last decade because the discourse wanted to see mental illness as something that exclusively makes you more virtuous instead of just kind of embarrassing.
Never thought of anything good to tell them to do instead, but "slow down a little and don't come off as a theater kid" has to be involved.
(Also, dark featured women with big ol eyebrows are pretty much my type, probably since my family are all blonde or ginger British people!)
I’ve never related to anyone’s account of their social issues more than this. Offputting strange woman who is liked by olds solidarity. I’m currently in college with the bf I’m going to marry, and constantly trying to level up my social skills practicing in class lol
Really special post, thank you for sharing! This line: “So the alternative, I assume, is you encourage your kid to continue being weird…” really stood out to me because parents go through some kind of struggle as well as the child is in process of self-discovery. It’s a lesser discussed POV. I know my parents certainly have but have never been able to properly express it.
Just because you were lonely in school doesn't mean that every person who is single is lonely. I was quite popular in school, but chose to remain unmarried throughout my life, because I
I agree, however the cohort of people I often post about on twitter is specifically single people who don’t want to be single, not those who are content with it.
Yes, I was going to write this! I enjoyed the rest of the post a lot, but I don’t understand the focus on “single” people when the author seems to mean “friendless” — or at least, people who have difficulty forming friendships. I also know many many single people for whom getting married and starting a family falls behind a lot of other priorities. Maybe it’s also a case of projection: “If I want this, probably everyone else does, too.” I related to much of the rest of the piece, again, but it just seemed to start off on the wrong foot.
I think you and Anne are slightly missing the point. CHH isn't drawing a 1:1 comparison between her situation and single men. She's saying, "I have special sympathy with men who want to date but have little success, because I have been in a similar situation (trying to make friends with little success)."
This is significant to me, because society is often unkind to both single men who struggle with dating *and* women who struggle making friendships. She's reaching out to men and saying "you're not defective, I see you and I relate to you."
I just reread her intro to make doubly sure. No, she is not talking about single men looking for love versus women looking for friendship. She says single PEOPLE. But since you projected those words onto her I’m guessing you read a lot of content of that nature so were primed to find that message where it wasn’t.
I had "single men" in my brain because I just had an extended discussion with CHH about single men specifically for an upcoming piece. But you're right, she doesn't specify gender. I messed up due to the recent discussion, completely my fault and I apologize.
That said, my mistake doesn't change the meat of my first comment (she relates to perennially single people because she's been in a similar circumstance), which I think clarifies the misconception you had in your original comment.
I don’t agree at all with your second paragraph, but I’m also not really interested in this conversation with a stranger anymore. We can agree to disagree. And I’m not a regular reader of hers, I’ve never read anything besides this piece. Everyone has their blind spots and missteps. That’s fine.
(you recently directed people to this post on Twitter, hence why such a late comment)
I was happy when I got to the part where you realized, from the help of friends, that maybe you were just a little too focused on yourself and would do better to show interest in others. I was never bullied like you were but I did have trouble getting people to like me until one high school friend, rather cuttingly but helpfully, got fed up and told me she was tired of me barging into conversations to talk about myself. I needed to hear it. I grew up as my parents' miracle baby who everyone, older siblings included, doted on and home life was all about myself. When you're thinking "why don't people like me" you enter this "me me me" mindset sometimes. I need to be interesting! I need to be entertaining! I need to be funny! If I think about who I like most it's people who *make me feel* like I'm interesting, entertaining, or funny. That means for other people to like me I should be interested in them, be entertained by them, laugh at their jokes. (It makes sense adults wouldn't pick up on that in kids because in any adult-child interaction it's usually all about the child anyway.)
But of course a person trying too hard here might inadvertently turn this into a bit or still manage to make it about them. Look at ME, selflessly taking an interest in OTHERS! You have to find a path to being genuinely interested, not faking it.
This obviously can't explain 100% of unlikability but I do find a large portion of it is just drawing too much attention to oneself and constantly forcing others to react to you in a way that is exhausting. It's just being "too much". I've always been in nerd-adjacent circles and a lot of nerdy kids (or adults) who don't make friends think it's their nerdy interests that are the problem, but often it's that they are not able to cede their nerdy interests to normie interests when necessary, they don't know when to shut up, when it's time to let others have the spotlight, etc.
“This was confirming that everything that had always been wrong with me—no matter how hard I scrubbed it away or worked to become better—was inextricably tied to me.”
Hauntingly familiar. I didn’t have the same problems making and maintaining the amount of friendships I wanted in high school, college, even after, but when around 22 I realized I’d never gone on a date and was suddenly keenly interested in finding out what that was like, I found myself just getting increasingly frustrated at the impossibility of it. Spent the next 3 years just trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to correct it. People’s well-intentioned advice tended to miss the mark in painful ways. A lot of self-help guidance tends to assume you can at least examine a failed first date or something, but I wasn’t even getting that far.
Anyway, I did (at the age of 25) get that first date, with someone who married me 2 years later, and I still think all those people who said external validation could never do anything by itself and it all had to start with self-acceptance were wrong — being married to an awesome person who likes me back is actually really great.
But I still have an interest in this subject, in large part because these experiences also exposed me to the existence of other people (mostly men but also several women) who had similar problems, similar feelings about it, and we could all kinda feel it making us crazy. Thank you for writing about this.
This post was funny and really endearing, thanks for writing it.
I'm in my 30's now and can relate to a lot of your experiences both in highschool and after.
It's so weird to grow up and expect at some point people will stop being weird.. but they don't!
They just keep on being weird!
Like the 30 year old ladies at your work were probably the same as the girl at the guidance counselor.
Sometimes people are just jerks and there's really no explaining it (I'm sure there's a psychonalysis reason where it's a reflection of their own insecurities or whatever, but you know what I mean)
Like.. there really is a bunch of people out there who really are just jerks for no reason.
How wild is that? lol. It's completely crazy to me. Maybe it shouldn't be, though.
Anyways, alls well the ends well.
And as far the mad internet people - they're going to be mad anyways. They'll direct that anger at you if you catch their attention, but that's definitely not an indicator that you did anything wrong.
Realy relate to this post a lot, I've always felt alone and a bit locked out socially and this totally matches with my own experience. There's a type of existensal despair that comes from knowing that you're unlikable but being unable to understand why you're percived as such. Olivia Laing book The Lonely City is pretty great but one of the interesting parts is the way she examines how a lot of people just instictivley blame lonely people as being responsible for their own plight and seem to ignore just how self-reinforcing it is; Social connection beget social connections, while people find it extremely unpleasant talking to someone who's alone or gives off lonely vibes.
It's just so bizzare how paradoxicaaly the only way to escape is to somehow ignore it exists, or something.
This was a beautiful read - it also really encapsulates the nebulous state of being likeable and how impossible it can be to get people to see you the way you see yourself, or conversely - see yourself how others see you.
Thank you so much!
I really liked this post! I was intrigued by the CHH lore about being unaccountably offputting in person and I thought this was a neat exploration of that, although I'm sure it's not fun to experience. And it's definitely true that adults like weird kids a lot more than their peers do.
It was an fascinating revelation halfway through that you didn't actually find other people individually very interesting. I wonder if that's changed over time? And also how much that was at the root of the other social problems (not claiming it was, I'd just be curious to run the experiment).
It has changed! I think I still have fairly high standards for what I consider interesting, I get bored very easily and that’s on me, but a big part of it was that I wasn’t asking people any questions, so I kind of just assumed they were boring!
I am horrified by that guidance counselor and her 'advice'. It does remind me of a situation where I went to the guidance counselor for advice when my daughter was in Kindergarten re: social situations in her classroom, to be told that "kids usually have their friend groups by now". IN KINDERGARTEN. Apparently she was behind already because she hadn't gone to the same preschool as the majority of kids/we didn't already know the parents socially. Needless to say we moved with no regrets a short while later.
I plan to homeschool my hypothetical future kids
This was an excellent post, thanks for writing it. What makes it more impactful to me is that I have so often been on the giving end of this phenomenon: I will very often identify someone as weird or annoying, decide I don't want to know them, and hold them at arm's length even if they try to get close (in fact, *especially* if they try to get close). I don't know why I do it, but I totally get it. The part of the story where the girl is walking to the bathroom with you and declines to talk about her favorite TV Show hits me perfectly... it's totally something I would do.
So uh... why?
I’m not the one you’re replying to, but I’m similar. I had some bad experiences with people like that in elementary school (I was one of the few who would be nice to them but then they didn’t end up being particularly good friends - they were just desperate for someone to hang out with. A couple were actually really mean!)
Appreciate the honesty.
Kys
Thanks for writing this ❤️ I relate so so much, especially the part about encountering these demons again as an adult and wondering if there’s something at your core that’s just not right 😢
This was moving to read. I relate to many parts of it, despite being pretty far removed from it. I was a boy who was never popular but that didn’t matter really because I always got along well with other nerds, and later arty people, despite being a bit shy. I also often find myself a bit obsessed with young loners, not because I was a loner myself, but because connection to friends was what really helped me get out of some negative spirals. But even though I’ve never been isolated it’s interesting how people seem to be able to smell on you whether you were popular in middle school.
I also found the stuff you wrote about how looks is more comprehensible than personality very interesting.
I also know what it’s like to be in the socially awkward club (which is no club at all), moving around from school to school every year in Montana, Canada, California and Alaska (not in that order). Something about me from my first days in kindergarten moved my peers often to physically attack me. My reaction (tactic?) was different than yours, though — to stay aloof, and to learn to outrun inevitable bullying gangs.
The experience taught me one thing, though. The constant American motto, wherever you go, is this: “Don’t be different. That bothers me. You better stop.”
The scars? At this point, with a small number of friends and a happy marriage (in which I do my part of the household chores and childcare), it’s simply to rather despise mainstream American ‘culture.’ (Perhaps I should want not to do this, but it’s there anyway.)
As it happens, our family lives a very non-standard life, and I do all I can to protect my offspring from the schools.
—
Also, I appreciate the ways you reach out in concern for lonely young people. Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere is being helped and encouraged.
Homeschool 👍🏾👍🏾
Homeschooling, while generally harmless in the preschool/elementary age, has some extreme drawbacks in secondary school. My oldest (now 23) is still trying to catch up socially after being homeschooled K-12. My wife and I put our younger kids in school after realizing what a disaster homeschooling in Middle/High School was.
It's your decision, but I just wanted to put it out there that homeschool is not some kind of perfect solution. Plenty of things can go wrong with it.
One thing I appreciate about your post is that, from watching those fabled fedora-tipping guys, the way you tried to make friends is pretty much the way they try and fail at meeting women.
(Luckily for them, there's a universal script that works for making shallow male friendships - memorize a bunch of facts on some technical topic and argue with people about them.)
I sort of wondered if it was related to ADHD hyperactivity, but you couldn't bring that in up the last decade because the discourse wanted to see mental illness as something that exclusively makes you more virtuous instead of just kind of embarrassing.
Never thought of anything good to tell them to do instead, but "slow down a little and don't come off as a theater kid" has to be involved.
(Also, dark featured women with big ol eyebrows are pretty much my type, probably since my family are all blonde or ginger British people!)
I’ve never related to anyone’s account of their social issues more than this. Offputting strange woman who is liked by olds solidarity. I’m currently in college with the bf I’m going to marry, and constantly trying to level up my social skills practicing in class lol
Really special post, thank you for sharing! This line: “So the alternative, I assume, is you encourage your kid to continue being weird…” really stood out to me because parents go through some kind of struggle as well as the child is in process of self-discovery. It’s a lesser discussed POV. I know my parents certainly have but have never been able to properly express it.
Just because you were lonely in school doesn't mean that every person who is single is lonely. I was quite popular in school, but chose to remain unmarried throughout my life, because I
I agree, however the cohort of people I often post about on twitter is specifically single people who don’t want to be single, not those who are content with it.
didn't want to lose my freedom. Not all single people are lonely and need "fixing". A great many are single by choice.
Yes, I was going to write this! I enjoyed the rest of the post a lot, but I don’t understand the focus on “single” people when the author seems to mean “friendless” — or at least, people who have difficulty forming friendships. I also know many many single people for whom getting married and starting a family falls behind a lot of other priorities. Maybe it’s also a case of projection: “If I want this, probably everyone else does, too.” I related to much of the rest of the piece, again, but it just seemed to start off on the wrong foot.
I think you and Anne are slightly missing the point. CHH isn't drawing a 1:1 comparison between her situation and single men. She's saying, "I have special sympathy with men who want to date but have little success, because I have been in a similar situation (trying to make friends with little success)."
This is significant to me, because society is often unkind to both single men who struggle with dating *and* women who struggle making friendships. She's reaching out to men and saying "you're not defective, I see you and I relate to you."
I just reread her intro to make doubly sure. No, she is not talking about single men looking for love versus women looking for friendship. She says single PEOPLE. But since you projected those words onto her I’m guessing you read a lot of content of that nature so were primed to find that message where it wasn’t.
I had "single men" in my brain because I just had an extended discussion with CHH about single men specifically for an upcoming piece. But you're right, she doesn't specify gender. I messed up due to the recent discussion, completely my fault and I apologize.
That said, my mistake doesn't change the meat of my first comment (she relates to perennially single people because she's been in a similar circumstance), which I think clarifies the misconception you had in your original comment.
I don’t agree at all with your second paragraph, but I’m also not really interested in this conversation with a stranger anymore. We can agree to disagree. And I’m not a regular reader of hers, I’ve never read anything besides this piece. Everyone has their blind spots and missteps. That’s fine.
She doesn’t say anything specifically about single *men* in particular.
Chief, it’s pretty clear that she’s not talking about the single by choice crowd. So why do you feel pointed at? If it don’t apply, let it fly.
(you recently directed people to this post on Twitter, hence why such a late comment)
I was happy when I got to the part where you realized, from the help of friends, that maybe you were just a little too focused on yourself and would do better to show interest in others. I was never bullied like you were but I did have trouble getting people to like me until one high school friend, rather cuttingly but helpfully, got fed up and told me she was tired of me barging into conversations to talk about myself. I needed to hear it. I grew up as my parents' miracle baby who everyone, older siblings included, doted on and home life was all about myself. When you're thinking "why don't people like me" you enter this "me me me" mindset sometimes. I need to be interesting! I need to be entertaining! I need to be funny! If I think about who I like most it's people who *make me feel* like I'm interesting, entertaining, or funny. That means for other people to like me I should be interested in them, be entertained by them, laugh at their jokes. (It makes sense adults wouldn't pick up on that in kids because in any adult-child interaction it's usually all about the child anyway.)
But of course a person trying too hard here might inadvertently turn this into a bit or still manage to make it about them. Look at ME, selflessly taking an interest in OTHERS! You have to find a path to being genuinely interested, not faking it.
This obviously can't explain 100% of unlikability but I do find a large portion of it is just drawing too much attention to oneself and constantly forcing others to react to you in a way that is exhausting. It's just being "too much". I've always been in nerd-adjacent circles and a lot of nerdy kids (or adults) who don't make friends think it's their nerdy interests that are the problem, but often it's that they are not able to cede their nerdy interests to normie interests when necessary, they don't know when to shut up, when it's time to let others have the spotlight, etc.
“This was confirming that everything that had always been wrong with me—no matter how hard I scrubbed it away or worked to become better—was inextricably tied to me.”
Hauntingly familiar. I didn’t have the same problems making and maintaining the amount of friendships I wanted in high school, college, even after, but when around 22 I realized I’d never gone on a date and was suddenly keenly interested in finding out what that was like, I found myself just getting increasingly frustrated at the impossibility of it. Spent the next 3 years just trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to correct it. People’s well-intentioned advice tended to miss the mark in painful ways. A lot of self-help guidance tends to assume you can at least examine a failed first date or something, but I wasn’t even getting that far.
Anyway, I did (at the age of 25) get that first date, with someone who married me 2 years later, and I still think all those people who said external validation could never do anything by itself and it all had to start with self-acceptance were wrong — being married to an awesome person who likes me back is actually really great.
But I still have an interest in this subject, in large part because these experiences also exposed me to the existence of other people (mostly men but also several women) who had similar problems, similar feelings about it, and we could all kinda feel it making us crazy. Thank you for writing about this.
I'm with you, Volcanica. I desperately wish honest feedback on social things were a thing. But it's still generally not a thing.
("Volcanica" is no dig. I dig it. Probably not as an in-person form of are address, but as an online nome de plume it's quite fetching.)
😂
This post was funny and really endearing, thanks for writing it.
I'm in my 30's now and can relate to a lot of your experiences both in highschool and after.
It's so weird to grow up and expect at some point people will stop being weird.. but they don't!
They just keep on being weird!
Like the 30 year old ladies at your work were probably the same as the girl at the guidance counselor.
Sometimes people are just jerks and there's really no explaining it (I'm sure there's a psychonalysis reason where it's a reflection of their own insecurities or whatever, but you know what I mean)
Like.. there really is a bunch of people out there who really are just jerks for no reason.
How wild is that? lol. It's completely crazy to me. Maybe it shouldn't be, though.
Anyways, alls well the ends well.
And as far the mad internet people - they're going to be mad anyways. They'll direct that anger at you if you catch their attention, but that's definitely not an indicator that you did anything wrong.
Some people just love to be mad on the internet.