1759: Mingler

Are you planning some sort of event that will bring together a number of disparate groups from your life? (Say, friendship groups from different eras of your existence, departmental colleagues from different parts of your business or family members from various far-flung corners of your family tree.)

Are you planning said event to involve a certain degree of social interaction?

Then do me a favour: stop subscribing to the popular wisdom that "mixing people up" is "a good way for people to get to know each other". Because it's not.

The theory is sound: make people step out of their comfort zone and meet new people and there's the chance of developing new relationships, be they personal, professional or even intimate.

But here's the thing: jumbling people up randomly (or even semi-randomly) is not a good way to go about this, for a number of reasons.

First is that in many cases, people will just bugger your plans and seek out their original groups anyway after a while, making the exercise largely pointless in most cases.

Secondly, and more seriously, by doing this you put anyone who has even the slightest degree of social anxiety in an extremely awkward position, where they're caught between the terrifying prospect of having to engage unfamiliar strangers in conversation without the support of their peers, and them coming across as that sullen loner who doesn't talk to anyone.

I haven't found a good way of dealing with this yet, and sometimes it's unavoidable. Invite someone to, say, a wedding as the only representative of a a particular group (as happened with my friend Cat's wedding a while back, where I was the sole representative of her Southampton years, albeit not quite alone as I had Andie with me) and I can forgive the situation as there is literally no alternative.

But if you deliberately and wilfully split up friendship groups — groups that have often formed on the basis of mutual trust — then I'm less understanding and, more to the point, less understanding. And considerably more prone to bouts of crippling anxiety.

I may well be in the minority on feeling this way. Social anxiety is a disorder, after all; a deviance from the norms of society. But I don't think it really hurts to at least provide the option for people who feel this way to remain with the people they know, like and trust.

Or, you know, just stop doing this altogether. I get the intention and it's somewhat admirable in theory. But it just doesn't really work, and in the meantime, there's a reasonable chance it will be putting at least a few people in the room in a situation of considerable discomfort. So just stop it, please.

Thank you.