The Fine Art of Introducing People.

There is no human social custom more terrifying, more fraught with psychological peril, or more likely to result in your immediate institutionalization than the simple act of introducing two people you know to each other.

According to anthropologists who are people paid by universities to sit around in khaki shorts thinking about things normal people avoid human beings have been introducing each other for roughly ten thousand years. Back in the Bronze Age, this was a relatively straightforward procedure. You would point at a large, heavily armed man wearing a dead badger on his head and say, "Thag, this is Grog. Grog has a bigger club than you do, so don’t touch his mammoth meat." Everyone understood the rules. Nobody's feelings got hurt, largely because the concept of "feelings" had not yet been invented.

Today, however, introducing people has mutated into a complex, high-stakes sport, akin to playing chess while riding a unicycle on top of a moving school bus. The primary reason for this is a medical phenomenon known to science as Acute Introduction Amnesia (AIA).

AIA is a condition that affects one hundred percent of the human population. It works like this: You are at a cocktail party, standing with your spouse of fourteen years. Let’s call her Linda. Suddenly, a man walks up to you. He is your boss. His name is Arthur Pendelton. You have worked for Arthur for six years. You see him every day. You know his dog’s name (Barnaby). You know he recently had a minor medical procedure involving his gallbladder.

Arthur smiles and stands there, waiting. Linda smiles and stands there, waiting. They are both looking at you.

At this exact microsecond, your brain, which is capable of processing billions of bits of information per second, completely shuts down. If your brain were a computer, it would be displaying a message that says: ERROR 404: NAMES NOT FOUND. WOULD YOU LIKE TO REBOOT USING THE WORD "BUDDY"?

You look at your boss. Your brain says: That is a man. He wears a tie. Is his name... Gary? No. Is it... SpongeBob? Could be. You look at your wife. Your brain says: This is the woman who shares your house. She frequently yells at you about the recycling. Her name is... Sparky?

The silence stretches on. It is a thick, heavy silence, the kind of silence that has its own gravity. You can feel the skin on your face starting to melt. You realize you have three options, all of them bad:

Option One: You can faint. This is highly effective, though it requires a certain amount of physical commitment to ensure you hit the hardwood floor with a convincing thud.

Option Two: You can pretend you are having a sudden, violent coughing fit and flee into the bathroom, where you will remain until everyone else has gone home.

Option Three: The "Mumble Strategy." This is where you wave your hands vaguely and say, "Arthur, I'd like you to meet mubbe-wubba-shmuh, and mubbe-wubba, this is wubba-mubbe."

The problem with the Mumble Strategy is that Arthur and Linda will both realize what you are doing, and they will spend the rest of the evening talking to each other about how you are suffering from early-onset neurological decay.

Even if you do remember their names, you are still not out of the woods, because modern etiquette dictates that you cannot simply state two names and stop. You are legally required to provide what etiquette experts call a "Conversational Bridge." This is a piece of trivia intended to give the two strangers a common ground so they can converse while you sneak off to the buffet table to eat shrimp until you pass out.

The danger here is that the trivia must be safe. A safe bridge is: "Arthur, Linda also enjoys competitive gardening."

An unsafe bridge the kind your brain will desperately try to blurt out because it is under immense stress is: "Arthur, Linda also has a weird rash on her left elbow that looks vaguely like Abraham Lincoln, and Arthur was recently investigated for tax fraud!"

Once you have delivered the names and the bridge, the final stage of the Art of Introduction begins: The Mutual Stare. This is the period where the two introduced parties look at each other with the naked hostility of two stray cats encountering each other over a discarded fish head in an alleyway. They both know they have nothing in common. They both know they would rather be anywhere else on Earth. They both know that you did this to them.

Eventually, one of them will say, "So! You do gardening?" and the other will say, "No, I hate plants," and they will both turn their heads slowly to glare at you with the intensity of a thousand dying suns.

My advice for the fine art of introducing people is simple: Don't do it. If you see two people you know approaching each other from opposite directions, the wisest course of action is to drop your drink, crawl under the nearest table, and pretend you are an unclaimed piece of luggage until the danger passes. It may look undignified, but it is a small price to pay for your sanity.