Vermont Is For Lovers, Socially Awkward Or Otherwise

by Audrey Ference

This weekend, Frank and I were invited to spend the fourth at friend’s family’s house in Vermont. We’d gone for the holiday last year, too, and knew that it was going to be awesome—the property is huge and beautiful and wooded, the house is old and charming, there’s tons of stuff to do and games to play and the couple who host always procure plenty of delicious food and booze.

So in short, we knew going in that we were going to have a good time. Last year, the group that went up was fairly small and made up of disparate parts: us, the hosts, a couple of friends from Neal (the male host)’s law school and a couple of ladies from Caroline (the female host)’s business school. Yes, by the way, all my friends are accomplished except for me.

The group meshed fairly well, because nobody really knew each other. This year, it was a much bigger group of people and split in half: my friends from college and their significant others—Neal and Caroline and I all went to college together—and Caroline’s friends from high school and their significant others.

Though it was a friendly split, there was definitely far less meshing. Anyway, so the reason that I’m bringing this up is because it was a really interesting opportunity to notice how social ability and pairing interact. Frank and I are both fairly shy people, and I’ve been feeling weirdly anti-social lately.

Not in the “I don’t want to see anybody” sense, but in the “I can’t seem to figure out anything to say to people I don’t know that doesn’t sound weird” sense. I mostly hung out with people from school, and Frank either read by himself or hung out with us. So I would say that we are both socially unable, but more insular together than apart.