There was a letter to Dear Abby yesterday that bugged me. It was nothing new, but I’m not going to let it slide. The letter ran as follows, “My fiancée, “Tara”, has a problem with social boundaries. … Recently, a male friend of mine quit talking to both of us because of her behavior. When I talked with him, about it, he said Tara makes him uncomfortable. She doesn’t understand where friendly joking stops and serious flirting starts. She gave him the impression she wanted to start an affair, so he walked away. Tara has been open and up front about everything. She doesn’t lie. It’ s like she doesn’t know any other way to interact with the opposite sex, and it’s spooking me before our wedding. I don’t want to have to be my fiancée’s constant social monitor.”

It’s a fair enough question, and I sympathize with the young man’s unease over his future wife’s apparent inability to appropriately process social cues. But as noted by the ellipse, I left out one sentence in the letter that bothered me. The writer not only describes the problem, but makes a diagnosis of just WHY Tara has the issue she does. He states, “She was home-schooled most of her education and missed out on a social life.”

Why is it that if there is a social-adjustment issue in someone who was homeschooled, it is ASSUMED that the issue arises from the mode of their education? If the letter writer’s fiancée had the very same issue, but had been through the public school system, he would not likely blame the school, but would be more likely to consider factors such as her family modeling, or even more likely, something along the Asperger’s line that interferes with her ability to properly process social cues. But, no. She was homeschooled and “missed out on a social life”, so that must obviously be the explanation.

However, if the ability to read, process and produce appropriate social cues is tied to the quantity of social interaction with others, then how does one explain the statistics on how much of the population is socially dysfunctional in spite of having been through our public education system?? The fact is, both public schoolers and homeschoolers run the same gamut socially: some are gregarious and make friends wherever they go, some have their small circle of friends that they are comfortable with, some are just kind of socially awkward by personality, and some have brain issues that interfere with social interaction. It is not how they were schooled, or whether or not they had a “social life”, that makes them that way.

Tara may well need some professional help to figure out precisely what is going on, since this kind of social handicap could be a real hindrance to her adult life. It probably would be best that she and the letter writer not marry until the issue is addressed. But I hope the letter writer digs deeper into what is going on with his fiancée than just blowing it off with “she was homeschooled and missed out on a social life”. She deserves a real explanation.