Estimated reading time: 20 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
Despite having told myself this every year since 2020, I really do intend to make 2026 the year I finally get myself out in the world and make friends (and hopefully meet a special someone, too).
For a brief background, my story isn’t atypical: 26M who, due to some unfortunate instances in early childhood that embedded a strong belief that I am an inherently unpleasant person to be around, never put himself in the dating pool, or even friendship pool.
All of the best opportunities for meeting like-minded people have passed me by; graduated college in 2024, and still kicking myself in the ass for never asking out that one girl who I actually may have had a chance with. The few friendships I have had throughout my life all have happened TO me, NOT through any effort of my own. So I come for advice on how I should approach actually putting myself out there.
Here’s the thing: I genuinely feel that I have a great personality for HAVING friends: I’m deeply compassionate, an exceptional listener, and love discussing deeper and more personal topics with people I care about and trust (so long as it isn’t in a group of 4+ people, then I just stay quiet the whole time). In the few times throughout my life in which I was blessed with the opportunity to experience such conversations, people have expressed how enjoyable I am to talk to.
Issue is, I have an absolute shit personality for MAKING friends. Small talk? Hate it, bad at it, don’t want anything to do with it. Meeting people at bars, or somewhere similar? I’m very sensitive to the noise and stimuli of crowds, plus I don’t drink. Social activities and hobbies? I much, much prefer to do things alone. Talk to people simply while I’m out and about? In comes my good old friend Generalized Social Anxiety Disorder and my heavily introverted nature. Talk to co-workers and try to make friends that way? My social battery is so low I simply can’t talk and work at the same time, lest I exhaust myself prematurely. It seems like every aspect of who I naturally am pushes me away from making any possible connection, or even from an environment where one may happen, and back to solitude.
Lack of connection with other people and ANY amount of intimacy has taken its toll on me throughout the years, this is something that has bothered me for a long, long time, and I want to have it figured out sooner rather than later.
What does a person like me have to do to make it work? How can I meet people I enjoy being around and who enjoy being around me without pretending to be somebody completely different?
Yet Another Hopeless Romantic
I am going to ask you a serious question, YAHR, and I’m going to want you to resist your immediate knee-jerk reaction, because I already know what that’s going to be. Instead, I want you to sit with the question and actually think it through, thoroughly and carefully. Ready?
Are you willing to accept that you’re wrong about yourself?
Here’s the thing: I get a lot of letters like yours; in fact, the very next letter for this column is going to cover very similar (some would say nigh-identical) territory. And every single time, the ultimate ask is the same: “here are all the reasons why it’s impossible for me to do the things I need to get the results I want. What’s the magic spell that will get me what I want without having to change?”
Now – and hang on, I already hear the sound of fingers hitting keyboards to explain why they’re a special case – I know you’re about to say that you can make some changes but so much of it is just beyond you and what can you do?
Well, that’s precisely my point. You have already set yourself up for failure, starting with your declaration that all the “best” opportunities to meet people have passed you by. No they haven’t, you avoided them. The passive voice will not save you here. You made a choice and then you reinforced that choice by saying that these were the “best” opportunities, tacitly declaring that you are now dealing with the lesser options. This does nothing to help you, and instead only serves to lower not just your standards, but also your expectations, which in turn creates the permission structure to not try as hard as you could because failure is already baked into the premise.
But that’s all a lie. The best time to meet someone is now. The best opportunities to meet people are the ones you actually take. The ones you ignore, avoid or choose to sit out aren’t truly opportunities at all. You didn’t miss them, you weren’t even in the same room as them.
So right off the bat, you are reinforcing your problem, making your loneliness and isolation definitional and permanent instead of situational and conditional. You are choosing to see it this way.
Which is where my question comes in: are you willing to accept that you’re wrong about yourself? Are you willing to fully and truly accept that the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are is just that: a story? Are you willing to actually not just challenge but push what you have long assumed are your limitations? And I do mean to truly accept that you’re wrong about yourself, not just make a token effort and then throw your hands up to say “well, I tried.”
Because here’s the part you’re really not going to like: you’re lying to yourself. You’re framing the issue in a way that gives you permission to not try, not really. Or rather, to “try” in the way that Yoda tells you not to – to make a half-hearted attempt, rather than to make an honest effort and fail. You are preemptively giving yourself permission to not make an attempt with your whole chest when you frame it as “pretending to be someone completely different.” Because you’re asking me how you can be someone completely different… without having to do what it takes to get there.
People change who they are all the time. Nobody is immune to change. You are not the same person you were five years ago, and you won’t be the person you are now in another five years. Who you are is a concept in flux, built out of a sequence of patterns of behavior and habits. Change those behaviors and change those habits and you become a different person. Those behaviors and habits will change over time; the only question is whether you’re going to direct them yourself or not.
That’s why I ask if you’re willing to accept that you’re wrong about yourself. The issue here isn’t that you can’t do these things. It’s that you don’t like to. You– in the words of one Bartlby T. Scrivner – prefer not to. What you are dealing with isn’t an inability, it’s a preference to avoid discomfort born out of unfamiliarity, and a desire to not have to deal with the friction that is inherently necessary to get where you want to go.
Small talk? You’re gonna need to get used to it. What you dislike isn’t small talk, what you dislike is feeling awkward and uncomfortable, because you feel stilted and awkward at first. What you want is to skip straight to the part where you feel at ease with someone and can talk about whatever and you want to believe that small talk is an unnecessary stage that people insist on because that’s just how neurotypical people do. Except… it’s not. Small talk isn’t the appendix of conversation, something that might have served a purpose once but is mostly vestigial and only matters when it gets infected. Small talk is about creating the possibility of being able to talk about those more interesting (not meaningful, interesting to you) subjects, where you feel more at ease. And that’s the thing: you think that small talk is superficial and stupid because you think that it’s not “deep”, “meaningful” or tell anyone important about who you are and what you think, and that is 100% not true. That’s cope. It’s how people try to convince themselves that their dislike of discomfort is, in fact, a sign that they’re deep and serious, not someone shallow and frivolous…
…while hoping they can move straight to discussing their favorite fan theories for what’s going to happen in the next book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
Small talk is the process of seeking connection and commonality with another person. Over the course of making small talk with someone, you’re both establishing a baseline of knowledge about the other person and a baseline consensus of reality. All that “nice weather we’ve been having” or “so, what do you do for a living” isn’t just verbal chaff being tossed out for the sake of being tossed out, it’s all a part of getting a handle on who the other person is, what you may have in common, what differences you have, and what sort of relationship you’re going to have. You’re looking for ideas of who this person is and what commonalities you might share. By finding and establishing those weak ties, you then make it possible to move from seemingly superficial topics to the more “meaningful” ones.
If, to use an inelegant metaphor, a conversation is a highway, small talk is the access road and entrance ramp that allows you to merge seamlessly into traffic. If you try to get straight on the highway, you’re going to get wrecked by the all the cars behind you or plow into oncoming traffic. Small talk lets you speed up to the flow of traffic, spot the opening and glide onto the highway with nary a ripple.
So if you want to start getting better at meeting people, then the first thing you have to do is let go of the idea that you hate and can’t do small talk and start actually making small talk. That means you have to actually do it. Not read about it, not theorize about it. You will have to go up to a stranger and make conversation with your mouth, in meatspace. There’s no getting around it.
The same goes for being introverted and having such a small social battery. Part of the reason why your social battery gets drained so quickly is because you avoid trying to drain it. Like with phobias, avoidant behavior only serves to make things worse; it encourages you to only do things that you are sure won’t drain your social energy. But all this does is make the world that you’re willing to live in smaller and smaller, with fewer and fewer opportunities for growth or improvement. When you’re trying to avoid draining your battery, do you know what you’re not doing? You’re not learning how to manage your resources more efficiently. You’re not finding work-arounds for the things that you can’t avoid or to mitigate the things that make it harder for you. You’re not increasing your battery’s capacity by being willing to hang in a little longer than you would otherwise, to be willing to trade momentary discomfort in the immediate present for improvements in the future.
In a very real way, your social battery is like a muscle. Again, one will have to forgive the inelegant and very simplified metaphor, but the way that you make a muscle grow (that is: to induce hypertrophy) is through progressive overload. You strain it to the point of failure, draining it of glycogen stores and tearing microfibers, which then increase capacity and repair the tears, which allow the muscle to endure greater levels of fatigue and exert more force. If you don’t do that… well, you get the opposite. The capacity drops, the fibers weaken and your ability to endure or produce shrink.
What this means is that, if you don’t have the energy to go be social, then you’re going to have to be willing to start exhausting yourself being social, so that being social isn’t so exhausting. And again, much like with small talk, much of this is because of discomfort and unfamiliarity.
Part of what drains your battery – as it were – is how much of energy you’re having to devote to push through the fear of that discomfort and the worry you’re going to do something wrong. You’re using up your resources just to get started, leaving you with nothing in the tank for later. Until you start getting comfortable with this – which is only going to be found through experience – you’re going to waste a lot of emotional energy just trying to get to the small talk stage, try to avoid that because you’re uncomfortable with it, run out of gas and tap out. And if you aren’t willing to accept that initial discomfort as the price of improvement, like accepting muscle soreness as the price of trying to get stronger or faster, you’re not going to get better at it.
The same applies to how you go about meeting people. While I don’t recommend doing things that don’t vibe with you – if you’re not a club guy, going to clubs isn’t a great idea, for example – but you’re going to have to go where the people are. Sure, you can always try to shortcut the process by focusing on online interactions but if that was going to work, you wouldn’t be asking me for help on meeting people. And you would still have to be able to turn those online interactions into in-person relationships, which puts you back at having to get comfortable with discomfort. So, while you may prefer doing your hobbies and passion projects alone, if you want to meet other like-minded individuals and potential friends (who you might see more than once every two years), then you need to start finding ways to enjoy doing those things with other people who also like doing those things. Even if, say, you’re just going to be doing your own thing next to folks at a makerspace or meetup.
This ties back into finding ways to make things work for you and mitigate the things that work against you. You’re going to have to apply some thinking and creative problem-solving, rather than hoping that there’s a perfect no-changes-necessary, a la carte solution that will absolve you from needing to change or do things differently. The noise level at venues is too much? Get earbuds like Loops, or Curvd, or Happy Ears, that are made specifically for dealing with sensory overload. Got problems with generalized social anxiety? Time to talk to a therapist and possibly look into medical options like beta blockers and anti-anxiety medication. Talking to co-workers leaves you exhausted? OK, well, you’re going to have to learn how to manage your energy, plan where you can conserve it so you can expend it where you want and find ways to get a quick recharge when you’re feeling low but aren’t ready to bounce.
So, I’m going to ask you again: are you ready to accept that you’re lying to yourself about who you are? If you are, and you’re ready to be the person you want to become – the person who makes friends, who isn’t afraid of making conversation, who is able to go out and be social instead of trying to avoid it, then you have to start actually doing those things. It will take time. It will be difficult. In many cases it will be unpleasantly uncomfortable, and you’re not guaranteed that you’re going to get the exact results you think you want right now. But here’s the part that you don’t see yet: as you take these steps and make these changes, as you expand your concept of who you are and what you’re capable of, then your idea of who you want to be, expect to be and “need” to be is going to change. You will get a much better idea of who you are based on experience instead of avoidance, and that will change where you want to go and who you want to be. You will learn what you think you want isn’t necessarily what you actually want and who you think you are isn’t who you need to be. You will learn who you are as you build yourself, like a sculptor letting the marble tell them what the statue will be.
But that can’t start until you accept that you’re wrong about needing to “pretend” to be someone else. You aren’t going to be pretending. You’re going to be shaping that person, guiding them, molding them.
That can’t start until you accept that it’s even possible in the first place. So recognize that “you” are only as stuck as you choose to be. Commit to pushing past the discomforts and not defining yourself by what you assume are your limitations. Stop looking for ways to avoid the friction and embrace it as part of the process.
As the saying goes: nobody said it would be easy. They just said it would be worth it.
Hello doc, let me preface this by saying I’m 99% normal, I have a house, a job, friends and family, all the normal shabang (I’m also already in therapy and to her my main problem seems to be that I’m too harsh on myself)
1) I’ve been following your content for a few years and there’s one thing that’s been sticking out to me: you seem to make it out that talking to another person is enjoyable.
Me? I’d rather smash my hand with a hammer then talk with someone. Like, I’d heard the advice of “talk to a woman like you’d talk to a cool dude” and I’m like “the moment a cool dude walks in the room I put myself in the corner, make myself as tiny as possible so I get no attention on me, me and cool dudes have never worked out”
Communication to me seems this weird arena where your will is put against the other person’s will and I genuinely don’t enjoy that?
If I’d never push myself I could exist in a room with another guy I could be happy to never talk to, however I don’t want that, I want relations, I want to exist beyond me.
However, I’m at a loss on how to do that in a spontaneous organic manner, I’m afraid of being thought of as too much of a robot and I’m double afraid that asking this question is going to make people think I’m one, sad beebboob
2) I once (20 years ago) turned in a really bad lab report, so bad in fact that they called in my mom, she looked at the date and explained that was because I was that week living with my scout group at the barracks(which was true), my teacher then expressed surprise that I actually wasn’t a shut-in. I’ve know people that were surprised I owned my own house, people that were surprised I had a job, even people that didn’t know I could drive a car (or thought I was one of those people that lost their license drunk driving), one time during a quiz my team partner (drunkenly, not his fault) called out to the rest of the group “yo, this guy’s not as stupid as we think he is”
The pattern is clear, something about the way I move or talk or something else is making me look worse then I actually am, is there a way to accurately (don’t want to have people overestimate too) have your value come across?
I personally think these are the 2 big reasons why I sleep alone at night
lot’s of love,
Malfunctioning Social Robot
I’m going to address the second part of your letter first, because it’s the shortest and most obvious. Nature abhors a vacuum and will attempt to fill it. This is as true of social vacuums as it is of physics; if there is an empty space, it will be filled. The only question is with what and by whom.
The reason why everyone thinks random things about you is because they have no reason to think otherwise. You made it clear – especially in the first part of your letter – that you avoid interacting with anyone as much as you possibly can. Well, that creates a vacuum in the shape of “you” – the things that define you, make you an individual and tell the world who you are. Because you aren’t filling that space yourself, other people are doing so, based off the only information that they have – which is just pure speculation, assumption and rumor. Because there’s nothing to contradict the incorrect assumptions other people are making, there’s no indication that they’re wrong.
If you want people to have a better read on who you are, you have to show them. And you can’t “have your value come across” if you avoid people.
This brings me back to the first part of your letter. I’m going to refer you to my answer to Yet Another Hopeless Romantic, because that applies here, too: if you want things to be different, then you have to do things differently. If you want to do things differently, then one of the things you’re going to have to do is give up the fear of “being a robot” and your attempts to avoid any and all interaction. You are precisely what I mean when I say that avoiding discomfort just makes the world you live in smaller and more confining; you have put yourself in a place where you may not experience discomfort, but you also don’t live. You simply stare out of the small cupboard you have chosen and wonder why you’re so alone.
And the answer is because you have removed any space for anyone else. That space can only exist if you first confront your discomfort and power through to familiarity and ease. Moreover, you’ve created a situation where what you want and what you need to get there are diametrically opposed to one another. The reason why you feel like you can’t interact with people in a spontaneous and organic manner is that you have put yourself in a place where you don’t develop the skill it takes to do so. Because it is a skill. The reason why other people – neurotypical or neurodivergent – seem to be able to interact in “spontaneous and organic” ways is because they have done it so many times that it’s muscle memory. It’s very much the same as why Michael Jordan and LeBron James can sink baskets like it’s just another Tuesday: because they have sunk millions of baskets before the one that they just made. Athletes like Alysia Liu weren’t born Olympians out of the womb; they trained and practiced for years. And they started by practicing the most boring of basics, the most fundamental of fundamentals, the things that seem so obvious and elementary that spending time on them seems pointless. But they didn’t. They practiced those fundamentals, then practiced putting those fundamentals together in different combinations. And then they would take those combinations and merge them with other ones and practice those. Wash, rinse, repeat until you’re standing at the podium with gold in your teeth.
But to get there, first you have to suck at it. Before you can be an incredible ice skater, you have to first be the person who falls ass over teakettle trying to get out on the ice. To be GOAT baller, you have to first be someone who can barely dribble a ball while standing perfectly still. Sucking at something – as the learned sage tells us, is the first step at getting kinda good at it.
When it comes to social skills, you will feel like a robot because first you have to go from unconscious incompetence – where you don’t know anything – to conscious incompetence, where you realize that you suck at it. And then you will need to practice to get to the conscious competence stage, where you will be able to do it, but only because you think through every step while you’re doing it. So, yeah, there will be a point where you will feel like you’re just beep-boop-loading-appropriate-social-greeting-boop-beep-don’t-ask-me-a-paradox because you have to think about things. And that’s fine. That’s how a skill is improved; you practice it until you reach the stage of unconscious competence, where it becomes muscle memory and it’s now just a thing you do, instead of a thing you have to think about.
That means accepting the awkwardness of learning a skill, while also accepting that being awkward is not nearly the sin you think it is. It means being willing to do things imperfectly, because an imperfect outcome is still infinitely better than the perfect outcome that you fantasize about. My shitty self-published graphic novel is still much, much better than the glorious one that never sees so much as one line on paper because mine exists. Your social skills may be flawed and imperfect and the conversations stilted and awkward at first, but they will be real, actual factual conversations and that makes them infinitely better than the quippy banter that only exists in your head because it will have actually happened.
And then, with time, experience and deliberate use, those reactions, conversations and connections will be increasingly fluid instead of awkward, flowing instead of stilted and organic instead of pre-planned. Because that’s how learning is done and mastery is created – by starting with the awkward and imperfect and keeping at it until you get to the other side.
So, if you want to have connections outside of yourself and to actually exist in the world, then it’s time to stop making jokey-jokes about smashing your hands with a hammer and hiding in corners. It’s time to embrace being a weird awkward robot instead of hiding behind it as an excuse.
Until you decide to make it happen and embrace all the imperfections, weirdness and discomfort that comes from learning… you’re not going to get where you want to be.
It’s up to you.
Good luck.
