Friends Like these
Classic Gin
Friday, 2006-01-06 | Classic Gin
Meeting new people is difficult.
Part of this has to do with how we meet people. In general, we see them in the sorts of places where people tend to gather as a matter of office or as a matter of habit; we tend to meet people at work
or at places where "social" gatherings are held. This is why meeting new people is difficult: meeting people for the first time in these sorts of settings always complicates the process and usually frustrates it.
The problem, I've recently noticed, isn't so much with the settings per se as it is with the fact that it is a rare individual who is completely comfortable with himself (i.e. "in his skin") in a work setting or a social setting.
Most people, given enough time, will find that the persona in which they are vested by their co-workers comes to resemble the one that have developed for themselves over the course of their life. I'd even gamble that the two come to resemble one another because of a blending or mixing of attributes: e.g. you're the clown at work and you become a more competent funny man in your real life.
It is, I have also noticed, almost impossible for a person to achieve anything like comfort or equilibrium in a setting that is overtly "social." And, if a person does spend enough time at the picnic grounds, the church or the bar to have become able to act with the grace, poise and comfort with which he acts in his private life, odds are that he won't have achieved those abilities across the board. The bar fly is uncomfortable at the company picnic and the HR expert who runs the social scene with an iron fist on weekdays becomes a jelly fish at family gatherings.
Returning to topic, we see that the above are reasons why meeting people is difficult and that they have nothing to do with the setting and more to do with how people are made uncomfortable and thus misbehave (in a very literal sense) in social or work settings. The fact that you met someone at work isn't so much the problem: the problem has more to do with the fact that both of you act like someone else at the office; bars aren't bad places to meet people, necessarily, but people tend to act the fool once they've crossed the threshold and entered into the public house.
There's really no solution to this problem: we can't all become experts on navigating every variety of work and social space and we can't expect others to do this either. The best we can do, I think, is to become comfortable in as large a number of settings as we can, expect that others will do the same and be willing to look the other way when someone misbehaves in a work or social setting.
This can be exceedingly difficult, however, and is a skill in and of itself that ought to be cultivated. It pains me to even think about recounting the story about the time that such-and-such decided that she was going to take me down a peg because I was behind the bar and she was nervous about being a deer in my headlights or about the time that so-and-so made it his business to frustrate each and every anecdote I attempted to relay because he was sure that I was trying to steal his thunder and be the funniest guy in the room.
Difficult as it may be to look the other way when adult people are obviously anxious and this anxiety drives them to misbehave, it greases the wheels. Being willing to tolerate and play along when an anxious person is acting gracelessly is graciousness itself.
And every action should be an attempt at acting with grace.