Helpful Tips from a Social Genius

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My friend Jane is a social genius.

She’ll invariably deny it when she reads that. The same way shamans rarely call themselves shamans, social geniuses rarely call themselves social geniuses.

But she is. 

She gets friendships and relationships and community and camaraderie.

She knows how to build all of the above.

She knows how to cherish all of the above.

She is, as I said, a social genius.

And here’s the most helpful thing I’ve learned (so far) from my social genius friend.

I’m going to share it with you because, well…I think more of us fall in my dazed and confused “how does any of this work?” than in Jane’s easy breezy “humans are naturally social” camp…at least if all those studies that talk about the loneliness epidemic are to be believed.

Here it is; the best thing I’ve learned from Jane: the phrase “not for me.”

That’s what Jane says if you invite her to something she doesn’t want to do: “Not for me.”

She doesn’t lie and pretend that her house is on fire and she has to deal with that.

She doesn’t apologize or justify.

She just says, “Not for me, thank you.”

Like last week when I invited her to a sound healing session. No pause, no “should I say yes?” Just a confident, “Not for me, thank you.”

Thanks for the invitation, but it’s not my thing.

Jane, in her social genius, makes it easy for others to say the same thing. The first time she invited me to karaoke (which she LOVES), she said, “Do you want to come to karaoke this weekend? Totally get it if it’s not your thing. My husband thinks karaoke is awful and would rather do basically anything else.”

Easy opportunity for me to say, “Not my thing, thanks” if I wanted to, but instead I said yes. I’m in for some karaoke.

I recently started following a woman named Simone Grace Seol on Instagram and quickly became obsessed with her. In her email onboarding (which I signed up for to get more of her gems), she wrote about how angry it makes her that “the entire ‘marriage therapy’ industry profits off telling couples that the way to happiness is ‘compromise.’” “GAHHHH,” she wrote, “That shit actually makes my blood boil.”

She was emailing out things that make her angry because she thinks it’s helpful to connect with people who are mad about the same things we are. See why I love her?

That myth – the one that says compromise is the path to happiness – it irks me too. It’s why I love Jane’s “not for me.” 

We live in a world with 8 billion people. It’s okay to not have the exact same interests and hobbies as every other person you meet. Maybe Jane and I have 30% overlapping interests. Maybe the hubbalicous and I have 47%. Maybe my very best friend and I have 63.2%.

I want to live in a world where we focus on the “YES I CAN’T WAIT” overlap instead of watered down, obligation-based, “yeah sure I guess I’ll do this thing I don’t actually want to do because it seems impolite to decline the invitation even though I’d rather saw my hand off with a dull knife than go.”

Then, for the things where there isn’t overlap, we just do them with OTHER people. There’s a perfect explanation of why this matters and how it works in Eli J. Finkel’s “The All-or-Nothing Marriage,” but I’m trying to get down to 1.5-page posts and I’m at my limit. 

More to come,

Keely