OK, I’m going to give you two rock-solid metaphors for social interaction.
- The Social Field
Everyone is surrounded by a field of social tolerance. When you touch, speak to, look at, or stand close to a person, your field interacts with his/hers. Even if you merely make that person aware of you in an impersonal way, like making noise, your fields interact. Each person’s field gets weaker with distance, so standing three feet away does not have the same impact as standing six inches away. But the distance is not merely physical: staring for a minute has more impact than glancing for a second. Making a questionable Facebook post has more impact than making a bland one. But if you accept the distance metaphor, it’s a bit like electrostatic interaction – the closer they approach, the stronger the attractive or repulsive force.
Here’s how it’s NOT like that – people have memories. This makes the effects of the interactions cumulative. A girl will remember you standing too close, and her field will be sensitized – the next time you do it, the interaction is stronger, even if you’re actually standing farther away. She will remember the Facebook post, and the interaction will be stronger yet. She will also reinterpret each interaction in light of the next, so that the effect is not merely cumulative, but exponentially so. If the first few interactions are unpleasant for her, or if one is particularly unpleasant, EVERY interaction after that, no matter how benign in itself, and every interaction before that, even if it was pleasant at the time, will become another factor in an enormous repulsive force.
The only remedy to such a situation is to stay away; maybe the extreme sensitivity will fade. Don’t count on it, and don’t try to make it better by being nice, because you don’t yet have the finesse required to ever-so-delicately brush your field against hers, making her aware of you, but in a totally non-offensive way. Just accept that it’s there, like radiation. With luck, maybe you’ll make a friend or encounter an adult who’s willing to serve as a Geiger counter.
- The Emotional Bank Account
It is also possible to view each person’s attitude toward you as a sort of bank account. When you do something nice, or have a pleasant social encounter, it’s a deposit in the account. When you do something unpleasant or unwelcome, it’s a withdrawal from the account. Almost everyone starts you off with a slight positive balance – some don’t, but most people are willing to extend you some credit. Every pleasant encounter improves your balance – even a simple day where you have no interaction will earn some interest on a positive balance.
But unpleasant encounters deplete your account – and the price for each similar encounter goes up, and you can easily get to a negative balance. When that happens, people start avoiding you, talking about you, and trying to get you transferred to another class. Worse, when you have a negative balance, people stop giving you credit – you don’t get the slow increase for just being around, and they may even take encounters that would previously have been deposits, and start interpreting them as withdrawals. You’ll be socially bankrupt, and there’s no choice in such a situation but to default – you won’t get your positive balance back for years (well, maybe months – teenagers can move things along fast).
Here’s something you should notice about both of these models – you don’t get to decide whether an encounter is pleasant or not; you don’t get to decide what impact it has. The people you interact with do. And they won’t tell you what the decision is, because an important criterion in making these judgements is how adept YOU are in perceiving them. So things have to get incredibly bad – downright intolerable – before they will actually say anything.
Another reason for that is that THEY don’t want to break their own rules – they don’t want to have to think poorly of themselves, they don’t want others to think poorly of them, and they don’t want to initiate unpleasant encounters with you, either, so they will not say the obviously hurtful things that might help you avoid mistakes. Instead, they will do the small, cruel things that will hurt later when you find out about them – social snubs, talking about you behind your back, and generally running down your status.
That’s longer and more depressing than I meant it to be, but I’m going to let it stand, because I remember the confusion and frustration – mine, as a socially inept teenager, and my brother’s, as a man with Asperger’s syndrome that wasn’t diagnosed until his mid-fifties. Nobody will explain the damn rules.