". . .on your way home afterwards you suddenly realize that you just spent the whole party so concerned about whether the people there seemed to like you or not that you now have absolutely no idea whether you like any of them or not. Anybody who's had that sort of experience knows what a totally lethal kind of attitude this is to bring to a party. . . ."
. . .(Plus of course it almost always turns out that the people at the party actually didn't like you, for the simple reason that you seemed so in-bent and self-conscious the whole time that they got the creepy subliminal feeling that you were using the party merely as some sort of stage to perform on and that you barely even noticed them and that you'd probably left without any idea of whether you even liked them or not, which hurts ther feelings and causes them to dislike you (they are, after all, only human, and have the same insecurities about being liked as you do).)
David Foster Wallace
from the essay "Octect" included in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
pg. 130