The partyphobe: Lucy Mangan
Fanny Brice was right. People who need people are the luckiest people, at least when party season rolls around. Imagine, if you will, wanting to go to a party. Imagine knowing that you will have a good time – that the mere experience of being around people fills you, as a matter of course, with joy and contentment. That you go home with a spring in your step, a song in your heart, a smile on your lips – refreshed, restored, rejuvenated and ready for the next one.
That is what life is like for most of the population. And then there’s us. The introverts. The people who do not need people. The people for whom people, en masse, are the worst thing imaginable. A stranger is not “just a friend you haven’t met yet”. This is a sentence that makes no sense to us. A stranger is just a person keeping us in a room, a situation we don’t want to be in, probably with music playing and definitely away from our books and our own lavatory.
I’ve said it before, but I will say it again and keep on saying it until everyone listens and understands: the clinical definition of an introvert is someone who is depleted by social interaction (outside a few very limited conditions). An extrovert is someone for whom they have the exact opposite effect. It follows, therefore, that just as you wouldn’t force the latter to refuse invitations and stay in, the former should not be required to accept them and go out.
In a just world, that is how things would be. Alas, we do not live in a just world. And so self-protective measures and evasive manoeuvres must be deployed if we introverts are to save our mental health and our limited capacities for socialising with the few people with whom we actually want to socialise.
The first and most valuable of these is to deny the existence of party season. Yes, the world and its chosen methods of marking various socio-religio-pagan dates are designed for extroverts. But it doesn’t mean you have no agency at all. Turn down as many invitations as you can get away with. Use fake excuses (keep a spreadsheet if necessary) or the God’s honest truth, depending on who’s asking. If there are two things on the same night, says yes to both and then realise your “mistake” later and cry off both. Only if the hosts don’t know each other, obviously. Use your common sense.
But there are always events you can’t get out of, whether family-, friend- or office-related. Then you have to simply cleave to procedures to minimise abrasion of the soul. None of them are great, because you’ve already had to have a shower and put clothes on and stuff in order to attend, but they’re better than nothing, and soon you will be home in joggers, slippers and the warm embrace of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I promise. Here’s how to cope with them:
1. Throw yourself into it
No, hear me out. You get to the venue. You walk in. You make a great noise and fuss over every vaguely familiar face you see (“Oh my God! It’s been ages! How are you?/You look amazing!/Oh, wow, look at us!” etc), using each one as a pinball uses a cushion – pushing off to the next one, never stopping, keeping the momentum going as you cross to the bar, grab a drink and then head off to – no one. You ride the wave of expectation you have created – surely no one who has made such a gladsome entrance, and now has a glass in her hand could possibly be dreaming of leaving? – and duck out. Much pain, sure, but much gain too.
2. Ask people questions
Small talk is the real bane of introverts’ lives. Fortunately, you don’t have to engage much in it. Just ask someone a question about themselves, fix a look of interest on your face and they will happily talk until you both die. But you can make your excuses before that. Hopefully. Do stay alert to your own state of mind behind the mask though. The particular blend of boredom, rage and contempt that parties induce is very toxic, and you can easily die after only a few minutes if you don’t keep an eye on things.
3. Create a solitude cushion
When you know something shit is coming up, prepare. Don’t go out for several days (or weeks, months, whatever your mileage requires) beforehand and don’t, FFS, plan to do anything at all in the days (weeks, months, etc) thereafter. Keep a bunch of old positive lateral flow tests handy for emergency excuses.
4. Go to the loo
As it sounds. Just go to the loo. You can go to the loo once per person. They don’t know the last time you went – or if they do, it’s probably a fetish thing and thus they are unlikely to call out your behaviour in front of others – and you can get a lot of alone time at every party this way. Have a pocket or clutch bag big enough for a book, obviously. But I don’t need to tell you these basics.
5. Break something
A glass, a fire alarm panel, a small bone, a large bone, whatever you need. When you hit your limit and you’ve gotta go, but are somehow trapped, take whatever steps are necessary. They shouldn’t have made you come in the first place. This is on them.
Good luck, and be careful out there.
The small-talk scientist: Joel Golby
I’ve never been particularly good at small talk. I was a shy child and an even shyer adolescent, and whatever adult charisma I have is learned rather than inherited. A few years ago I became tired of becoming sweaty and nervous when thrown into a room full of strangers at a party or a work event, and so started curating a list of party-starting questions that I keep in a big file on my phone. For instance: hypothetically, if I were to offer you chewing gum, would you opt for one pellet or two? Excluding air travel, what’s the highest you’ve ever been above sea level? Everyone had to go to hospital for a weird reason between the ages of eight and 10: what was yours?
People have, rightly, told me this is quite pathological behaviour – and for some reason this method of question-asking does seem to really rankle people from certain nations. When it works, it really works. I have a few theories as to why this is: first, British people are still wrapped up in the bizarre idea that we’re very mannered and polite, and hesitant small talk is a part of that – in British mouths, the non-conversation of small talk is close to a ceremony or a traditional dance.
Second, it is genuinely hard to make a connection with a stranger, and small talk is the grey, safe no man’s land of spending five minutes standing next to someone at a party before the person you actually know comes back from the kitchen. Any deviation from the form is necessarily more interesting than pausing for a really long time before going, “So … did you have to come far?”
Third, and most crucial – people do not get asked direct questions about themselves very often. When was the last time anyone truly asked you anything about yourself? Let alone, “What is your go-to order at McDonald’s?”
“Man, I haven’t been to McDonald’s in a minute,” says Paul C Brunson, matchmaker, mentor and relationship expert on Celebs Go Dating and Married at First Sight UK, “but my favourite is always: quarter pounder with cheese, the biggest fries humanly possible, and I would skip on a soda, or any type of sugary drink – I get water, so therefore I can get an Oreo McFlurry. That would be perfect.”
Paul has helped hundreds of people make romantic and social connections over the years, and knows a thing or two about making conversation in a crowded room. “My biggest tip is actually about context over content: when you’re at a party or social situation, there will be a lot of people on the periphery of the room – the wallflowers – and there’s always people standing in the middle. And what you’ll notice is the people in the centre of the room will typically be the most powerful. So if you want to assert yourself, or if you want to try to be strategic, or you just want to engage in the most powerful conversations, physically move to the centre of the room.”
When it comes to starting a conversation, Paul says being transparent is the way forward. “I think anything loaded, or predetermined, makes the initial interaction feel fake and fabricated and fraudulent. Every time you meet someone and start a conversation, you’re literally starting a relationship – whether that relationship lasts for five seconds, or five years, or the rest of your life. And the worst thing to do is start that from a place of inauthenticity.” If that means you’re approaching someone in a romantic context, that means genuinely saying what made that person catch your eye: their smile, the book they were reading, the clothes they were wearing. If it’s a crowded Christmas party and you’re wearing matching ugly jumpers, saying that’s the reason you’re talking to them can be an effective ice‑breaker.
If you’re talking to someone who doesn’t have a list of questions on their phone (“What’s the best piece of gossip you can tell me about someone you know but I don’t?”), and the conversation is dull and spiritless as a result, then Paul has a couple of ways of politely extricating yourself. “A time-bound commitment is the neatest way of getting out of a conversation,” he says. “‘Hey, I’m picking my kids up at four’ – that’s time-bound. Or you could be getting ready for the time-bound commitment: ‘Hey, I have to go because I need to get ready to see my PT at 8pm.’” During Christmas party season, “Well, we have to leave fairly early so I had better make the rounds,” can help you elegantly leave a conversation without having to exit the event entirely.
Another important conversational tip is to let the person you’ve just been talking to feel listened to, or affirmed. “Everyone wants to feel affirmed,” Paul says. “‘Hey, it was so nice meeting you, I learned so much about … whatever.’ No matter what the conversation was, affirm the person, let them know you appreciate what you learned from them. That’s a great way to excuse yourself, because it leaves them on a high.”
As for Christmas-themed party starters, yeah, I’ve got a few of them. “What was the best present you got as a child?” is always a crowd-pleaser, as is asking them what role they had in the school play (you can always, always tell who was the narrator). Ask if they have siblings, then ask what was the most amount of trouble they ever got into together growing up, and if they didn’t, ask them what nickname their secondary school had for the ominous van that parked outside at lunch and sold single cigarettes and 50p mix (ours was, simply, “the aggy van”).
Open-ended questions (“If you had to slaughter one of Ant and Dec, which one would it be, and why?”) are obviously better than closed ones (“Do you like Ant and Dec?”), or anything that makes people go “Mmm”, dart their eyes up to the right, and start to access deep archives of memory they haven’t unearthed for years.
But, mostly, remember that conversation is a two-way street. “It’s about you receiving information, but it’s also about giving it,” Paul answers, after I ask – so remember to talk a bit yourself instead of just asking, asking, asking. And, if all else fails, everyone has a least favourite mug in their house, and is ready and willing to tell you about it at length. Get on to the mug chat, and you’re in for a glorious evening of conversation.
The boring guest: Rhik Samadder
The problem of small talk is evergreen. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.” But have you noticed that advice always focuses on how to escape boring people at parties? This positions every attender as the heroic victim, stuck with dullards of below average chat. That makes no statistical sense. It’s time to speak up for the forgotten majority, the one responsible for dragging the energy down at gatherings. It’s me. I’m other people. I’m boring at parties.
There’s a lot of trash talked about my people. Claims that we have boring jobs and nothing to say. That we’re pedantic, get sidetracked in stories or bogged down in details. We’re often reduced to a single tribe: that of the men who won’t stop talking about themselves. My problem is the precise opposite: there’s nothing I want to talk about less than myself. Do I mean fewer? No, less. That’s right. Where was I?
These ideas are myths. I have a very interesting job, to the point it’s undignified. At a party recently, I met a former paymaster general of the UK – a job so important I didn’t know it was one. When asked what I was currently working on, I said I was growing a moustache to see how it felt. I have plenty to say. It’s just that I can’t bear to hear myself saying it.
Some of this is due to hating the sound of my voice. Lots of people feel the same (about themselves, I must add). But mostly – and go with me here – it’s about alienation. There’s a reason “What do you do?” or “Tell me about yourself” are unwelcome openers. To make ourselves digestible to strangers, we amplify our flattering traits, flattening the narratively inconvenient aspects. In lieu of the truth, we rattle through a highlights reel. We perform our jokes and best thoughts, favourite stories sandblasted clean through years of telling.
At parties, I used to deploy conversational jiujitsu to avoid answering any direct questions at all. How do I know the host? Does anyone know anyone, really? Where do I live? The past. What do I write about? What don’t I write about?! It was as tedious as my angst is cliched. And so these days, I find myself mostly sitting dumb, ineloquent and unforthcoming, the most boring person in the room.
My biggest nightmare is anyone who wants to penetrate the ring fence of polite chitchat and break into the paddock of vulnerability. To avoid the small they go big, and come prepared with probing questions. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made? What’s your attachment style? Which of your siblings do you like least? I’d rather talk geopolitics or culture wars. I take too long to answer, or say too much. This conversational style should foster connection, but it feels too high stakes, and how do you know whether you can trust the asker? Let’s keep this breezy.
My friend Charlie is great at talking to strangers. I asked him what he does when he gets bored of his own spiel. “Just give a brief precis and throw it back to them,” was his advice. This works pretty well until I meet someone like me, who is up to the same game. The resulting back and forth can be an enjoyable duel, light and quick as ping-pong. Or maybe it’s two walls, endlessly reflecting each other. Maybe it’s just Pong.
I’m not looking forward to giving the worst version of myself this Christmas. And I doubt I’m alone. So please, this holiday spare a thought for the sweating, banter-free fun-sponges you meet at your next party. We’re not boring, only boiling in the bath of ourselves like existential lobsters. Stick a pick in me, that’ll break the ice.
