People generally like me. I'm something of an introvert but usually have a few close friends at any given point. People consistently tell me I'm funny, interesting, and a good conversationalist. Friends who introduce me to their girlfriends even frequently tell me how much their girlfriends liked me. One even recently told me that he had to take care of some stuff in the middle of a social event, and asked me to hang around his girlfriend because she has social anxiety but really liked me.

I also very rarely succeed with dating, and to many on PPD and elsewhere on Reddit, this means that I must have poor social skills.

Really, it seems like people just sort of reflexively say the "social skills" thing because they want dating failure to be about anything other than physical appearance, and they figure they can cherrypick something from the interaction as evidence of bad social skills. If a lonely guy gets agitated and says "OK, just fuck off", they'll be able to say "Yep, there's your problem. Bad social skills."

If that fails, they'll narrow the definition of "social skills" to "flirting", which they will then fail to define in any useful way. I don't want to retread old ground too much, I made a "Debate" thread about a month ago where I basically said "if you're telling someone they're bad at flirting, you should at least tell them how to flirt well." As expected, no one actually explained what constitutes "good" flirting.

It's vagueness and goalpost shifting all the way down. No one actually believes that lonely men's primary impediment is poor social skills, they just say it because it sounds nice, and then deflect any rebuttals with "Eh, well, too complicated to explain." It's not remotely that complicated, you just don't actually believe what you're saying.