anonwums

I’m beginning to think that the major problem with my conversational skills is not that I have nothing worthwhile to say. Indeed, I know far more about a wide number of random topics (politics, music, science, history) than pretty much everyone I know. I know strange and odd facts about pretty much any topic at hand other than sports. I’m thinking that it’s really the nonverbal stuff that is torpedoing my conversations.

Yesterday, I did a little experiment. I went to a happy hour at a bar I’ve never been to before and where I knew no one. And I talked to them. I decided I had two goals. Firstly, I would try to speak louder. Secondly, I would make eye contact with the people I was talking to. I tried to gaze into their eyes or at least look at their face.

I discovered two things. Firstly, a lot of other people can’t make eye contact with me. I had an entire conversation with a woman and she spent most of the conversation staring off to the side. I had another conversation with a different woman, and she started off avoiding it but later started making it. I had some conversations with guys, and they were better but many of them got distracted by the sports playing on the TV. Secondly, I discovered that when I focused on how the other person was reacting by looking at their face, I completely forgot how I was reacting. Nearly all my anxiety went away and I became distinctly aware of other people’s discomfort or insecurity. I’m going to try this again for a few weeks and see if it gets me anywhere.

I have noticed that those people I know who are universally loved are also fairly loud people.

I need to be more confident and assertive. This is my main problem. But even when I am confident, I am not assertive primarily because I’m a fairly quiet. Right now, I’m working on faking confidence by simply being louder when I talk. I’m not sure how to constantly remind myself to increase the volume up a notch when I’m speaking, but I have to reset my baseline volume so I’m constantly louder.

I’ve been thinking about the type of people I want to meet in this city, and I’ve concluded that there are three types of people my age in my city:

1) Young professionals: these people have recently graduated from college and have fairly profitable jobs: investment bankers, real estate agents, loan officers, and the like. Some of them took over the family business. They make a lot of money, live in expensive apartments, drive expensive cars, wear nice clothes, and go to trendy bars with overpriced drinks and valet parking. They don’t really worry too much about money but rather about personal status. For example, the local young professionals group seems to be full of these people, as they host all their events at expensive bars and have fundraisers that cost $50 to get in.

2) Hipsters: these people either never went to college or went to college but majored in a liberal arts degree and either don’t want to use their degree or can’t find a job. They tend to work as waiters or waitresses, bartenders, secretaries, or other components of the service industry. They don’t get paid very well, and they spend most of their money on cheap beer, drugs, vintage clothes, and concerts. They really like the local music scene, and although they overtly shun everything trendy, they’ve really just established a subculture in which they judge everyone else who doesn’t conform to their trends.

3) Graduate students: these are somewhat in between the hipsters and the yuppies. They are well educated, probably overly so, but they don’t get paid very much. They can’t afford to live the yuppie lifestyle but they don’t really find that much satisfaction living the hipster lifestyle. In my city, they are pretty much despised by the local population, who recognizes that they don’t fit in and also accuses them of being leeches that are just in town to get educated and leave. As a result, they tend to be fairly insular and socialize exclusively within graduate student circles. My university in particular has cliques within each school, which only further compartmentalizes us.

I fall into category #3 and I find it horribly frustrating. As I try to expand my horizons, I meet people who fall into the other two, but when I’ve tried hanging out with them, they’ve made it painfully clear that I don’t belong. The hipsters called me “college boy” and the yuppies were incredibly condescending, suggesting that I was a child and wasn’t smart enough to amount to anything. The other graduate students don’t seem too interested in meeting new people or welcoming them into their cliques.

I really don’t know what to do about this. I’m sure there are laid back, welcoming people in this city. I’ve been here for 7 years actively looking, and I have yet to find them. Oh well.