Awkward

  But online mediums are not enough to satisfy our need to belong. Most people need to get face-to-face with their friends to feel truly connected and like they have found a place to belong. The emerging research regarding online socialization suggests that online mediums work best as catalysts for getting face-to-face with people or as supplements for people who have gratifying in-person interactions with friends. The best practice is to use online communication to get things going or augment ongoing friendships, but to turn off the devices used for online communication once you get face-to-face with someone. Although online socialization has been a great way for awkward people to find new friendships, online interactions have a set of expectations that need to be learned and followed.

  Once we open a text, email, or go on social media we are faced with a relatively vague set of social expectations that are not yet clearly established and tend to vary among different platforms. For example, a stream-of-consciousness post is permissible on Twitter but annoying on Facebook; the oven mitts you want to buy are good to post on Pinterest, but not so fun on Instagram; and the bikini selfie from the foam party in Cancun is great for Instagram, but potentially career ending on LinkedIn. In the early years, Facebook users needed a few years to realize that posting about their household chores, check-in at the gym, or daily commute was not the kind of social information other people in the online community really wanted to know. Instagram came along as a different social media context with different expectations: it was all right to share a picture of the healthy dinner you made (#nom), your abs that were now visible after months of those healthy dinners (#blessed), or a photo you took of the sunset while you commuted home (#dangerous).

  While people struggle to figure out their online identities, they also struggle with understanding how their online life relates to off-line friendships. Even though it’s socially desirable for people to say they do not care much about social media, the truth is that most people nervously check their phones every minute after they post a photo or link, hoping for a respectable number of likes or comments. The implication is that they believe their posts’ likability is reflective of their social status with their friends or might influence their social status. But is there any evidence that online popularity translates into being likable in real life?

  The early research findings regarding people’s online behavior and their off-line social lives have produced surprisingly nuanced results. Among the studies I reviewed, I found the most interesting results were about the association between online behaviors and popularity versus likability. We already know that being seen as influential is not the same thing as being seen as pro-social, but this rule can be easy to forget when one gets lost in the social media universe.

  Zorana Ivcevic and Nalini Ambady conducted an interesting study of social dispositions and social media. They wanted to investigate whether users’ Big Five personality traits—extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—would be associated with their Facebook behavior. They recruited ninety-nine college students who allowed the researchers to monitor their Facebook activity for three weeks. Ivcevic and Ambady found that participants who were high in agreeableness, a trait that corresponds to pro-social views, generally posted less frequently on Facebook, except in one circumstance: when they wanted to show emotional support for their friends. They also found that people were more likely to initiate social media interactions with participants higher in agreeableness.

  These findings and similar results from other studies suggest that being likable in real life and being likable online stem from the same underlying factor, which is being someone who maintains a pro-social disposition toward being fair, kind, and loyal.

  Trickle-Down Social Economics

  BROCK ENDED UP becoming a great tennis player and an even better friend. Sometimes I wonder how he would have dealt with the significant social changes of the past two decades. He might have tossed around a few curse words about the slow decline of traditional manners or the constant barrage of selfies, but I cannot imagine that it would have changed his proclivity to be a generous, fair, and loyal guy and to do his best to find those qualities in others. When I have come up against adversity in my life, I oftentimes wonder how Brock would have handled similar situations or try to imagine what kind of encouraging words he would have offered.

  Brock was one of those friends who upended the way I approached social life. Instead of trying to think about how I could nickel-and-dime my way to social inclusion through meeting small expectations, I began to see that if I approached each situation asking, “How can I contribute?” that the specifics tended to take care of themselves. If I was consistent about maintaining these pro-social attitudes, then I built some cushion for those times when I inadvertently bungled some social situations or mishandled an expectation in ways that offended others. But I also saw how giving other people the benefit of the doubt and proactively investing in them created more social capital for everyone and that pro-social attitudes had a way of trickling down through social groups and bound them together.

  I think that it’s not a good idea to expect that friendships will change you, but once in a while you are lucky enough to find friends who end up being surprisingly influential and create lasting change in how you see the world. Brock helped me change from being someone who was always reactive to social situations into a guy who thought ahead about how to proactively give.

  They say that you can tell the true character of a person by watching how he treats people when he has little to gain from them and by how he conducts himself when he is faced with adversity. When Brock was diagnosed with terminal cancer when we were juniors in college, I guess that I was able to see his true character.

  During this extraordinary difficult time in Brock’s life, the adversity seemed to make his way of valuing others even more readily apparent. He never complained about the hospital food or when nurses had trouble drawing his blood. He joked about the sleekness of his new bald look and remarked that the awkward-fitting hospital robes were a step up in his fashion game. Whenever I walked into Brock’s hospital room, he always expressed how grateful he was that I had taken the time to visit and in his weakened state he always tried his best to sit up to pour me a glass of water. He was supremely interested in hearing about my small triumphs at university even though he had no chance to experience similar victories from the confines of his hospital room, and he was sincerely invested in hearing about my challenges even though his were far greater.

  Brock respected the fact that people held social expectations that he might not care about, and even though his behavior could be odd at times, no one really cared much because they knew that he was governed by a simple set of values: be fair, be kind, and be loyal. In the end, those guiding principles were more than enough to make him the kind of guy people wanted to befriend and hoped to emulate.

  8

  DATING AND SEX ARE SO AWKWARD

  During the spring of my ninth-grade year, Coach Arfsten scheduled a four-week golf unit and so we walked around the football field and soccer field with our putters and three-irons. We would have been turned away from most real golf courses for wearing our standard 1980s physical education uniforms. The five-inch red nylon shorts were too short and too tight, and the tight white T-shirts stopped right at the top of our shorts.

  By the eighth month of the school year and the third week of playing golf we had grown bored with a game that was too slow paced for adolescents who were looking for more excitement. The novelty we sought was delivered one cloudy afternoon when my group teed up on the fifth hole. Two large dogs approached each other by the tee box and began to circle around each other like yin and yang. We immediately saw the promise that something entertaining was about to happen, and by that I mean inappropriate.

  The dogs eagerly sniffed each other and it was exactly the type of crude act for inducing adolescent giggles of delight. When the male dog became excited by the female’s intoxicati
ng scent, something in his hindbrain reflexively initiated the launch of his red rocket. We burst into raucous laughter, a mix of amusement and horror, which resonated around the course like the call of wild animals summoning their pack. Everyone dropped their clubs and ran to the fifth hole to see it firsthand. We stood around the spectacle pointing and giggling with crude delight until the sniffing stopped and the dogs broke from the yin and yang formation. You could have heard a golf tee drop on the grass as our giggles turned to nervous anticipation.

  The climax of this experiential biology lesson occurred when the eager male pit bull finally mounted the female dachshund, who looked surprisingly disinterested. We were stunned by the duo’s combination of odd shapes and unexpected agility, and the silence among us became louder as the male pit bull’s enthusiasm turned into a more workmanlike persistence.

  Chrissy Silus let out a shriek. Her bulging green eyes were so wide that her horror looked cartoonish. Her hand was over her mouth and her index finger eagerly pointed to the source of her dismay. Our eyes followed the direction of her finger and the trajectory landed our attention on Timmy Johnson’s tight red gym shorts. Timmy had launched his own rocket and then Chrissy Silus gave the announcement that no one needed: “Timmy got a boner!”

  The fifth hole of the golf course was far from any kind of refuge for poor Timmy, who took the most dignified response available. He did a slow, 180-degree turn and stood motionless with his hands crossed in front of his red shorts. After an awkward pause, a moment of group indecision, the rest of us simultaneously felt a renewed interest in the game of golf. It was a surprisingly empathic response from the class, an unspoken agreement not to make this awkward moment any worse. People briskly walked back to their respective holes and all eyes were focused on drives and puts as Timmy slinked back to the locker room.

  I am sure that Timmy did not know why he pitched a red tent at that moment. He may have wondered whether he was wired to be one of those sexual deviants we heard about on the Dr. Ruth radio show late at night. Timmy’s ill-timed excitation, which happened to co-occur with the doggy mating spectacle, was probably just an example of correlation not equaling causation. But part of what makes puberty so awkward is that our onset of romantic interest comes with trying to learn the toughest set of social expectations most of us will encounter in our lifetime, while our physical and psychological changes are happening with an intensity that feels unbridled.

  During puberty, the world feels very intense, fast-paced, and unpredictable. It gets better as our hormones calm down and we become accustomed to a more complicated set of social expectations, but one social domain that all of us are slow to understand is how to navigate our romantic relationships. In fact, even as grown adults we can feel like the world of dating is overwhelming in intensity, too fast-paced, and unpredictable as ever. Part of the awkwardness of dating is inherent to this unique type of relationship, but there is a new awkwardness that stems from the technological age of dating, in which the rules of engagement are less clear than ever before.

  What Happened to the “Romantic” in Romantic Relationships?

  IF YOU FEEL like dating is awkward, then you are certainly not alone. In fact, dating and sex have become so awkward that it’s tough to tell whether awkward people have a harder time dating than non-awkward people. The confusing nature of modern dating begins with the fact that the traditional endgame for dating, which for thousands of years was marriage, has changed dramatically in just a few decades. Lifelong commitment has become a moving target and that has made it harder to plot a course from where single life begins to where it ends.

  Take the simple message you want to convey after a good first date: “I had fun. I would like to see you again.” But for the modern single, sending that simple message has become very complicated. Should you text, send a message through the dating app, or risk the audacity of a phone call? If you text, then should you use an emoji? Should your text end with a period, an exclamation point, or should you leave the end naked? Should you send the text when you get home, the next day, or in the middle of the next week far enough from the date, but not too close to the upcoming weekend? All of these minor details have a way of gaining psychological momentum in our minds, each becoming a monumental decision that could signal that you are disinterested or conversely a stage-five clinger. Because there is so much ambiguity around the proper move, the situation starts to feel forced instead of fluid. In other words, the situation feels awkward.

  In 2013, across all age groups, the percentage of people who are not currently married has never been higher, with 48 percent of adults categorized as single. Part of the reason for this high rate of singlehood is attributable to 41 percent of first marriages ending in divorce, but also due to a higher proportion of never married people. A report by the Pew Research Center found that in 1960, 68 percent of young adults ages eighteen to thirty-two had married. That rate of marriage had dropped significantly by 1997, to 48 percent, and by 2013 the rate of marriage among eighteen to thirty-two-year-olds had dropped to 26 percent.

  Although some sociologists speculate that millennials are simply waiting longer to get married, I find that assumption is far from guaranteed. A 2010 report from the Pew Research Center found shifting attitudes toward marriage when they compared millennial respondents ages eighteen to twenty-nine to boomer respondents ages fifty to sixty-four. Millennials were more likely to say that marriage is becoming obsolete (44 percent) compared to boomers (34 percent) and millennial respondents saw new family arrangements as a good thing (46 percent) more often than boomers (28 percent). I’m fairly agnostic about delayed marriage and young adults’ far less eager position on marriage, but these shifts do raise a practical question: If adults are not busy doing married things, then what are they doing?”

  In an age of dating apps and friends with benefits this may surprise some people, but Pew and Gallup researchers find that most people still want a romantic relationship with substance. The majority of millennial singles say that they hope to marry someday (70 percent) and across all age groups about 87 percent of singles hope to marry or remarry. Most people still want to find a love story that ends happily ever after. But most singles—whether it’s a divorcee who is getting back into the dating game or a millennial trying to Tinder or Bumble their way to a decent guy or gal—will tell you that it’s pretty tough out there.

  Gerrymandering the Friend Zone

  BEING IN LOVE is a categorical variable. You do not hear people say that they are “kind of in love.” When people fall in love, they fall hard and they fall completely in love. Although it happens only a few times during the course of one’s lifetime, the recipe is surprisingly simple. There are two ingredients: liking and lust. If there are sufficient amounts of both, then there’s a good chance that people might hit the tipping point where they fall in love.

  When marriage by age twenty-two was the endgame and people decided who to marry based on whether they were in love, then the goal of dating was relatively clear: only date people with whom you might fall in love. However, when the goal is to defer marriage until the late twenties or early thirties, then an awkward pocket of time is created during the twenties. If someone starts dating at age fifteen and is likely to be married by age twenty-two, then they essentially have seven years to lock someone down, but if someone starts dating at age fifteen and is likely to be married at age twenty-nine, then the number of years to date doubles to fourteen years.

  Modern dating is like hosting a dinner that has been pushed back from 7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. You do not want to put the duck in the oven too early and you don’t want to eat a full meal while you are waiting for your late dinner, but you also get hungry in the meantime. You decide to snack. You start out pretty healthy with some baby carrots, then decide that those carrots need some Ranch, shift to something more substantial like a Hot Pocket, and next thing you know you are eating Nutella out of the jar. The decline in the quality of the food does not sit well with you and
suddenly you are wondering why you decided to snack in the first place.

  Such is the life of the modern single who hopes to find love, but not too soon. Personally, I think it’s great if people get the best of single and married life, but striking this balance is difficult. Like our finicky host of the dinner party, singles don’t want to start cooking the pièce de résistance too early, which means that they might try to delay falling in love, because falling in love leads to commitments, and commitments can infringe upon one’s independence. When people fall in love there is a natural progression, which includes talk about whether there is an “us,” joint ownership of pets, living together, and eventually the M-word. When people try too hard to delay the natural progression of commitment, the relationship can be like a duck that was put in the oven too early and now suffers under a heat lamp that robs it of flavor and dries it far past well done.

  To avoid this kind of lame duck relationship, people who want to date while they forestall falling in love have three strategic options, but all three strategies involve carefully treading a slippery slope called commitment. The first strategy is to find someone for whom you feel some liking and lust, but not too much of both. This is a perilous strategy because it starts you off with the two necessary ingredients in place, which leads some people to try a lust-only or liking-plus-benefits strategy of dating.

  The lust-only approach is adopted by the single who recognizes that people have physical intimacy needs and who aims to have those needs met not by a full-time boyfriend or girlfriend. The advent of online dating apps has made this easier because the main filter for most technology-based dating is the profile picture, which is the primary way that users gauge a potential partner’s physical attractiveness. If someone is on the lust-only dating plan, then some dating apps are an ideal medium for efficiently finding a temporary partner not only because of the interface, but also because the app provides a seemingly limitless number of options in metropolitan areas. The third strategy is the liking-without-lust route, which involves redistricting the friend zone by turning a friend into a friend with benefits.