A friend, a counsellor by profession, decided at some point that I needed social skills training. She did not tell me this. She began the training without informing me that training had been determined to be necessary, which is itself a social behaviour worth examining, though I did not examine it at the time.
Her diagnosis rested on a single observation: I spent much of my time alone. From this she had constructed an account of my situation—that I was socially isolated, that the isolation reflected a deficit in social competence, that the deficit was producing the isolation, and that the isolation was a problem requiring correction. The account was internally coherent. It was also entirely wrong about the subject it described.
The method ordinarily applied in social skills training—the role-playing, the modelling, the positive reinforcement of appropriate behaviour—is designed for people whose social exchange fails because anxiety, impairment, or inexperience prevents it from forming. None of these conditions were present in my case. I had spent twenty-five years as a sex worker with a substantial returning clientele. Whatever social skills are, they had been tested over twenty-five years under conditions that did not permit them to be theoretical. The preference for solitude that my friend had observed was a preference, not a symptom. These are different conditions. She did not distinguish between them.
She began by introducing me to her social circle. This was the curriculum. Each introduction was followed, after the other person’s departure, by a private assessment—where I could have improved the connection, what I had missed, what I should have done differently. The assessments were delivered in the tone of someone genuinely trying to help. They were accompanied by details about the people she had introduced me to: their histories, their circumstances, the private context she had assembled about their lives. She shared these details with the same frankness she presumably applied to conversations about me when I was not present.
I noted this. A person who shares private details about their friends after they have left the room is sharing private details about everyone. The knowledge increased my desire to tell her nothing about myself, which she would no doubt have recorded, had she known about it, as further evidence of the social deficit she was working to address.
On one occasion, a male friend of hers spoke at some length about a medical procedure he had recently undergone. I listened. I asked a few questions. I allowed him to continue. I was aware, while this was happening, that my friend was watching me with the specific quality of attention that precedes an assessment.
Afterward, she praised me. Did I really know about his disease, she wanted to know.
I did not, I said. But being sociable means allowing people to talk about themselves. I also said that I did not think people ought to air their diseases in public when they did not know their audience.
It was at this point I understood that a course of instruction had been underway.
I considered whether she was right. Not about the disease—the observation about audience was sound—but about the broader project. Whether there was something I was missing, some register of social life that her professional training had given her access to and that my preference for smaller, slower, more deliberate connection had left me without. The consideration was brief. The evidence against it was the twenty-five years. The evidence for it was thin and amounted to the fact that she had decided it was so.
On another occasion I mentioned, after speaking with a mutual acquaintance, that I had forgotten to ask for the person’s phone number. A minor oversight. My friend offered a correction: in order to get information from people, one had to interrupt and ask for it.
This was the moment I understood that the training was over. Not because I had completed it, but because I had seen clearly what it was.
Interrupting a conversation to extract information before the speaker has finished what they were saying is not a social skill. It is an anti-social one, or at least a skill optimised for information acquisition rather than for the quality of the exchange. My friend had confused the two. She had constructed a model of social interaction as a series of techniques for producing desired outcomes—information obtained, connections formed, exchanges completed—and had interpreted deviation from the model as evidence of incompetence rather than evidence of a different set of values about what social interaction is for.
I did not want the phone number badly enough to interrupt someone to get it. This was not a failure of technique. It was a priority. The technique she was describing would have produced the phone number and cost something I valued more—the quality of the conversation as it was actually proceeding.
Social skills training has its place. Where anxiety, impairment, or inexperience prevent social exchange from forming, structured practice can be useful. It addresses a real gap. What it cannot do is distinguish between that gap and a preference for a different kind of social life.
People whose social exchange fails because of anxiety that is genuinely debilitating, or because of developmental conditions that make the reading of social cues difficult, or because of inexperience in situations they have not previously encountered—these people can be genuinely helped by the structured practice of specific behaviours in safe conditions, with feedback that allows them to adjust. The intervention addresses a real gap between the person’s current capacity and the demands of the situations they need to navigate.
What it cannot do is distinguish between this gap and the preference for a different kind of social life from the one the model assumes is desirable. The model assumes that more social connection is better, that wider networks are preferable to deeper ones, that the person who spends much of their time alone is spending it in a deficit state that the right techniques could address. The model is not interested in whether the person wants what the techniques would produce. The model has already determined what a good social life looks like and has measured the deviation from it.
The deviation is the diagnosis. The technique is the treatment. Whether the patient regards their condition as a condition is not, in this framework, a clinically relevant question.
My friend was not a bad person. She was a person who had been trained in a model of social health that defined connection in specific, measurable ways, and who applied the model to the situations she encountered with the thoroughness of someone who had invested significantly in it. The model told her that solitude indicated deficit. She observed solitude. She applied the intervention.
What the model could not accommodate was the person whose solitude was self-selected, who had extensive social competence they chose to deploy selectively, who found the texture of her social circle less interesting than the texture of their own interior life, and who regarded the sharing of private details about friends as a more significant social failing than the failure to interrupt someone to ask for their phone number.
These were not differences in skill. They were differences in values about what social interaction is for. The training framework does not have a category for this difference. It has a category for competence and a category for deficit, and it maps the observable behaviour onto one or the other. The observable behaviour was solitude. The category was deficit. The training followed.
What sits underneath this particular experience is something broader than one counsellor’s misapplication of a model to a subject who did not fit it. It is the tendency, visible across the systems that manage social life, to treat deviation from a particular model of connection as a condition requiring professional intervention. The model is specific: connection is good, more is better, the skills that produce connection can be taught, and the person who does not produce connection at the expected rate has a skills deficit that training can address.
The model produces a particular kind of professional. One who watches you in conversation and assesses your performance. Who shares private information about the people in the room to help you contextualise the interaction. Who tells you to interrupt when the information you want is still forthcoming. Who mistakes the extraction of information for the quality of exchange, and the correction of technique for the improvement of relationship.
The model also produces a particular kind of intervention: the training. The role-play. The post-interaction debrief. The scaffolded introduction to a social circle selected by the trainer. The ongoing assessment of whether the deviation from the model is narrowing.
The intervention is what requires explanation. Not the solitude.
The solitude was fine.
The training was the thing that needed looking at.
The Vorpel Foundation