Awkward

  I say that I am awkward by nature but socially proficient by nurture. My parents and mentors like Mr. Z found a way to install a customized software in my mind that allowed me to use my unusual mental hardware to find work-arounds to most social situations. When it comes to any awkward child, the trick for parents and teachers is to provide a clear system of expectations and a framework for how those “if-then” rules link to the broader values of the household or class. For parents, this is particularly important while preparing children for modern social life because in the midst of a fast-changing technology and information age, it’s harder than ever to find answers about how to behave in a well-mannered way.

  7

  THE AWKWARDNESS OF MAKING FRIENDS

  Brock had never picked up a tennis racket in his life, but Coach Martinez saw the raw elements of a great player. As a speedy point guard for the basketball team and a scrappy shortstop for the baseball team, Brock had shown tremendous athleticism, but also an exceptional level of grit and mental toughness. These latter qualities had inspired Coach Martinez to recruit Brock for his varsity tennis team, which could use a good dose of mental toughness.

  On the first day of practice, most of us wore white, five-inch-inseam shorts and white tennis shoes, which was not a style of dress that made Brock comfortable. He wore baggy basketball shorts and black high-tops that left long scuff marks on the court. He swung with both hands on his forehand and backhand, and his swing started with his fists swirling around by his back shoulder, like a batter getting ready to crank out a fastball. Brock’s personality was also rough around the edges. He played with an intense scowl and cursed in creative ways that astonished the country club crowd. While Brock did not look the part of the archetypical tennis player, he could sure play the game of tennis. No one had ever seen someone move so recklessly on a court, dive for so many shots, and hit the ball with such fury.

  After the first week of practice, Coach Martinez decided that Brock and I would be paired as doubles partners. I am pretty sure Brock threw his head backward and rolled his eyes when he heard this announcement; I was not exactly a vision of mental toughness and athleticism. I also had some trepidation about his intense personality and wondered whether we would find common ground.

  I was intrigued that Brock was so unapproachable at practice, but well-liked among everyone who had known him through grade school and middle school. He rolled with the popular crowd, but he didn’t seem to care about any of the artifice involved with achieving or maintaining popularity. Cool clothes and cool cars were of little interest to Brock; he preferred to focus his efforts on his academics. He met few of the social expectations that were usually applied to people in his social group, and his intense focus on his schoolwork rivaled that of the nerdiest kids at school, which meant that Brock should have technically been classified as a nerd or socially awkward. Yet if you asked anybody at school what they thought of Brock, they would have said, “He’s a really cool dude.”

  During the second week of practice, I had an off scrimmage. A few bad shots turned into a few more bad shots and eventually I couldn’t do anything right. I was choking under the pressure. Eventually, Coach Martinez sent me to run laps around the track while the rest of the team finished practice. It was a smart move on his part because it stopped me from doing further damage to my eroding self-confidence, but I felt like I had embarrassed myself. No one else on the team had practiced badly enough to be exiled to the track.

  After Coach dismissed the rest of the team, he forgot that I was running laps at the track until he was in his car driving home. He drove down to the track and found me staggering around the bend and apologetically told me that I could stop now. He gave me a few encouraging words and told me tomorrow was a new day. It was a long, contemplative walk back to the locker room, but when I ascended the hill from the track I saw Brock waiting by the gate of the tennis courts with a bucket of tennis balls. In a matter-of-fact tone he said, “Hey, partner, let’s hit a little more.”

  Among teenage boys there is a primal survival-of-the-fittest mentality that even crops up in the cushy confines of the suburbs. Boys have an aversion to aligning themselves with the weakest link in social groups because mere association can threaten one’s position in the ever-competitive social hierarchy. Brock was socially proficient enough to understand that I was clearly the weakest link that day, but he was not interested in protecting his social capital. Although he had not chosen to be partnered with me, his family had instilled an ideal in him that dictated his choice in that situation: “If someone is at their lowest point, then that’s when you give them the most.”

  We hit in silence for about forty-five minutes. I started hitting the ball well and eventually I was hitting with confidence. At the end, Brock said, “Stay tough, man, we’ll get there,” and took off on his brisk run home. In just forty-five minutes, I saw why Brock was universally liked and revered as a “cool guy” among people who knew him well. He had formulated a theory of social life that heavily weighted fairness, kindness, and loyalty, and by doing so he was able to bypass a lot of minor social expectations. Brock didn’t have to worry himself with as many social expectations as other likable people because he was able to exert tremendous leverage on his friendships with relatively few actions. It was a valuable lesson for me, and one that is more important than ever in the midst of a social landscape that is undergoing dramatic changes.

  How Many Friends Are Enough?

  KIDS STARTING THEIR first day at a new school, middle schoolers going away to summer camp, and teens headed off to college all feel anxious about making new friends. It’s human nature to worry about fitting in, and many schools and social clubs intentionally create infrastructure to help individuals feel like they belong. Extracurricular activities in schools, group projects, and even bonding activities at camp provide a social infrastructure to facilitate interactions and spark potential friendships. These are worthwhile efforts because students with strong friendships perform better in school, are less likely to drop out, and in the long run are able to learn lifelong lessons about how to build social capital that will be essential to their personal and professional success.

  But when people enter adulthood, they are finding social environments that are less structured than those of previous generations, and this has made it challenging for both awkward and non-awkward people to find and navigate new friendships. This is a concerning trend because the importance of friendship does not diminish once people become adults. As John and Stephanie Cacioppo of the University of Chicago point out in their review of social relationship research, people who feel like they have strong friendships sleep better, are far less likely to be depressed, have better cardiovascular health, and live about 26 percent longer than people who are chronically lonely.

  Friendships are integral to social life above and beyond the benefits we derive from our families, work colleagues, and romantic partners, but adults are finding that making friends feels a little more awkward and elusive these days. This chapter explores the changing state of modern friendship for both awkward and non-awkward people, and how our social ties have been affected by the demise of traditional social institutions, more diverse expectations, and casual attitudes toward etiquette. I’ll also take a brief look at the few studies that have examined social awkwardness and friendship, but there are broad social forces that can make friendship formation feel more awkward for everyone.

  The contemporary notion that social life is undergoing dramatic changes was brought to light in the 2000 book Bowling Alone. The author, Robert Putnam, is a professor of public policy at Harvard University, and in Bowling Alone he cites evidence from large-scale surveys that suggest there has been a sharp decline in civic participation in the United States since the 1960s, which has corresponded to a growing sense of isolation. Putnam’s message that people were finding it harder to belong in society struck an emotional chord and received widespread attention from academics, policy makers, and the general
public.

  The name of the book came from an illustrative finding that the number of people bowling increased by 10 percent from 1980 to 1993, while participation in bowling leagues declined by 40 percent over the same period. Although some of Putnam’s conclusions have been debated, there was strong support for his conclusion that people were leaving traditional institutions such as churches, political parties, and social clubs, which removed structures that once facilitated social connectedness.

  In the sixteen years since Bowling Alone was published, there have been further participation declines in traditional social institutions. These seismic social shifts have created a new social terrain that remains relatively uncharted, which makes it worthwhile to take a look at how the social changes of the past two decades have influenced the way people find social ties and how they navigate those relationships. If you feel like making friends is more awkward these days, then you might take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone.

  To begin our investigation of whether close friends are harder to find, it’s interesting to begin with a simple question: How many friends do people have and has that changed over time? Cornelia Wrzus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and her colleagues provide some answers to this question from their investigation of 277 different studies about the number of friends and family members people reported across different age groups. Their results suggest that people have the largest social groups from ages ten to twenty-four. The average teenager has about nine friends they interact with on a regular basis, but that shrinks to about seven friends by age thirty, and continues to decline throughout older adulthood. The number of family members people reported seeing on a regular basis was stabler over time, with all age groups reporting regular contact with about seven family members.

  If people need about three or four reliable relationships to satiate their need to belong, then the average thirty-year-old with seven friends and seven family members would seem to have plenty of close relationships. But being able to see people on a regular basis is not the same thing as feeling a sense of connection with those people. Although the feeling of connectedness is somewhat related to the total number of friends, it’s more strongly influenced by their perceptions that these interactions are gratifying. One interaction that leaves someone feeling understood and supported carries far more psychological weight than ten interactions that fall short of one’s expectations. This is why it’s common for celebrities who are surrounded by adoring fans or CEOs who are inundated with meetings to often feel painstakingly lonely in the midst of constant social interaction.

  The United Kingdom’s Mental Health Foundation published a 2010 report that provides some clues about how many people feel lonely. They recruited more than two thousand people across a wide range of age groups and found that 11 percent of respondents reported that they “often” feel lonely, which is notable, but far from epidemic. They found a different pattern when they asked people about other people’s loneliness. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that a close friend or family member was “very lonely” and 48 percent agreed that “. . . people are getting lonelier in general.” It’s possible that the stigma associated with loneliness led some people to underreport their personal loneliness, but these same participants were more willing to report loneliness when it did not apply to them.

  Although these overall rates of loneliness are substantial and concerning, it’s interesting that they have actually decreased over the past two to three decades among teens and young adults. Matthew Clark and his colleagues from the University of Queensland analyzed the results of forty-eight studies of loneliness among U.S. college students and found that loneliness scores declined from 1978 to 2009. In a second study, they analyzed data from a representative sample of more than 300,000 high school students and found small but steady declines in loneliness from 1991 to 2012.

  Although the general trend was for loneliness to decrease among teens and young adults, Clark and colleagues also discovered a few anomalous findings. From 1991 to 2012, high school students became less likely to report that there was someone they could turn to if they needed help and also were less likely to feel that they could usually get together with friends. These findings echo the results of another study by Miller McPherson at the University of Arizona and his colleagues, who found in a representative sample of more than fourteen hundred U.S. residents that the number of people who said they have no one to talk to about important matters tripled between 1985 to 2004.

  Overall, these results about friendship suggest that the average teenagers and adults are satisfied with the number of friends they have and that this quantity is enough to keep them from feeling lonely. But there are indications that not being lonely is not the same thing as being satisfied with one’s friendships. Although the size of our social groups has not changed, people may be feeling a diminishing sense of real connection with the friends they do have. Sociologists and psychologists have been intensively studying what accounts for this slowly growing malaise in friendship, and the results of their studies can help us map the new social landscape of friendship and identify where opportunities for friendship reside.

  The Demise of Social Institutions

  SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE studied hundreds of possible factors that predict why people become friends. After decades of testing elaborate theories, the answer has repeatedly come down to three factors: proximity, similarity, and reciprocated liking. In other words, we end up being friends with people who are close by, who are similar to us, and who are willing to tell us that they like us. These results might sound like common sense, but many people find that it’s challenging to translate these principles into practice.

  For most of the twentieth century, social institutions brought people together in churches, offices, or social clubs. People in these groups were more likely to share similar values and interests that were disseminated by their religion, company culture, or social organization. Membership implied that people shared a common affinity with one another and were bound together as brothers, sisters, colleagues, or friends. If people were eligible for inclusion, then members found that these social institutions facilitated proximity, a shared sense of similarity, and literal belonging to a group.

  The first major shift in the social landscape began in the 1960s, when people began to lose faith in social institutions and their participation rates plunged. Paul Taylor and his colleagues at the Pew Research Center released a 2014 report that showed the turn away from social institutions has been particularly pronounced among millennials, those born between 1981 to 1996. Taylor and his colleagues found that compared to older adults, millennials were far more likely to identify as political independents, less likely to affiliate with a specific religion, and significantly less likely to enter the institution of marriage by the age of thirty-two.

  Some pundits decried millennials’ declining participation in traditional institutions as a consequence of their laziness or an erosion of moral virtues, but it’s hard to blame millennials for developing some skepticism. For example, they watched big banks’ deceptive lending practices nearly collapse the U.S. economic system in 2009, then saw CEOs from these failed institutions collect millions in severance pay while middle-class families with subprime mortgages struggled to stay afloat. They also observed that some religious institutions were slow to reject sexist or homophobic views, which did not sit well with millennials’ inclusive attitudes. The wave of highly publicized sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church added further damage to the overall perception that religious institutions could be trusted.

  Of course, it’s unfair to make blanket statements about groups or institutions. There are far more good people than bad apples in big corporations and religious institutions, but the actions of a few have had far-reaching consequences. While millennials showed the strongest mistrust and decreased participation in traditional institutions, all generations reported declining institutional trust and participation r
ates.

  Figure 7.1 Generational difference in institutional participation and attitudes

  When group members were less likely to question their political party’s platform, church mandates, or company mission statements, there was less confusion about how members should behave. People were simply expected to act in accordance with their institution’s prescribed expectations, which could include things as specific as how to dress, when to speak, and even what to say. Although institutional expectations were relatively easier to understand, the appeal quickly faded once people did not agree with the expectations or simply wanted the freedom to negotiate those expectations. One would be hard-pressed to find many millennials who will gladly join a workplace where they have to follow strict dress codes, speak only when spoken to, and whose default response when spoken to should be “yes, sir” or “right away, sir.”

  Eventually corporations began to ditch the suits, employees were encouraged to speak their minds, and at some Silicon Valley companies “yes, sir” was replaced with valuing people who were willing to challenge the status quo. Churches replaced staid organs and hymnals with electric guitars and contemporary lyrics. The new pope even posted a few papal selfies with church members. But turning around the culture of a large institution is like trying to turn around a large cruise liner, which has meant that institutions and individuals have been caught in an awkward cultural limbo while everyone tries to figure out how to come together in new ways and with a revised set of standards.

  Most people probably prefer this freedom from institutional control, but freedom has a way of provoking anxiety about whether one’s personal decisions are socially acceptable. This paradox between society’s desire for freedom versus society’s desire for imposed standards from institutions is a sociological version of Freud’s impulsive Id against the rule-governed Superego. Our societal Ego has been caught in the middle, trying to figure out what it means to “be yourself” while also showing respect for a set of societal standards that seem to be constantly on the move.