Speaking from my own personal experience, lack of social skills is definitely a problem for a lot of people. I have severe ADHD, grew up without ever really learning how to make friends or even carry on a conversation properly until recently. I had learned a lot of conversation structure from therapy and just trying to get shit done on the phone with call centers, and eventually paid money out of pocket to get social skills coaching in a group setting, over Zoom. It helped a lot, got me oriented in the right direction, figure out just exactly what I needed to work on the most. That was about a year ago, and now I'm pretty damn good at talking to people. I even see all the things other people are doing wrong, and I am wise enough to know that trying to correct them won't fix it, but it will embarrass them, so now I understand it from the other side. I'm also making progress on speaking to women and just, well, treating them like people and listening to them and saying nice, sincere things does a lot to endear you to people. So yeah, being poor at socialization is a major barrier to ever getting anyone to like you, let alone a woman you're attracted to.

But there's a lot of baggage I'm still sorting through as well. Negative self-image and lots of poor experiences with women when I was younger still has me doubting myself even as I get phone numbers and casual first dates, my female co-workers compliment my beard and my voice and how funny I am, etc. More to the point I'm realizing now that I've been out of the dating game for so long, and was so bad at it when I was younger, combined with my depression and inattention, makes it so that I kind of... can't even recognize when someone is attracted to me or wants me around. I'm blind to it and have been for years, and still basically deduce that someone is my friend from context, since there's a part of me that believes that nothing about me can ever be appealing. I'm trying to heal that part of me. I suspect I'm not the only man who has this wound inside of him. But it's a painful one, and it can lead you to cause pain to others by projecting malice and contempt where it isn't, reading ill intent where none exists, and avoiding people entirely for fear of the confusion and pain that so many interactions with them can bring.

So yeah, poor socialization and long-term isolation and all of the psychological trauma attached to those are probably something a lot of American men are dealing with. We're kind of thrown to the wolves at a young age, and not much is ever really done about bullying. Certainly no teacher or other adult intervened when they saw how much trouble I was having socializing with the other kids. There weren't a lot of resources for me to look into. Nobody liked me so nobody was willing to be patient enough to sit with me and figure out just what the hell I was doing wrong. Poorly socialized people lose out on so much of life, so much of just being a human being. And it's a self-reinforcing problem. If you don't know how to ask for help, you won't get any. If you don't get any, you start to feel like it's because you don't deserve any. If you can't escape the downward spiral it's just a slow, sad, terrible death by emotional neglect. Especially self-neglect. Because if you don't socialize, nobody teaches you how to treat people decently. And you probably don't know how to treat yourself decently.

I am somewhat disturbed by people putting "social skills" in quotes here, as if they're not skills that require practice. Eye contact is a really big part of socialization, and knowing how much and when to apply it, let alone getting over a total aversion to it, are necessary to make an emotional connection with lots of people. Finding the rhythm of a conversation, reading people's faces to guess at their emotions, and how genuine the shown emotions are, being able to gracefully change topics, or even just using affirmative barks ("uh-huh, wow, that's crazy bro") are things that you have to pick up with practice. It's just that most people pick that shit up when they're children, because they're in tune enough with others already to build up the skills. When you're in your 20s or 30s and you still don't have that shit? It's hard. You overthink it sometimes. You underthink it sometimes. You focus on the wrong things. It's frustrating. It's embarrassing.

Apply all of this to men who are in a digital environment that pushes the worst and most exploitative impulses onto everyone, all the time? A sea of shitheaded influencers who promise to tell you how to more effectively objectify and manipulate women into sex? A social environment that demands men push down their emotions and suppress ones that are not acceptable to other men? Of course lots of them fucking suck at dating. They can barely communicate with themselves. Let alone someone that makes them nervous just by being attractive to them.