Damn, get out of my head, this sounds so familiar. I wish I could mod you (and your parent) up. I had an almost identical experience between High School and College. I suspect, based on my personal experiences and observing others around me with a similar geeky bent, that this is rather common. I think it could frequently boil down to being an introvert and poor social skills for many men. It also didn't help much that many of the people in high school knew each other since grade school (much harder to over come preconceived notions about people for good or bad). College gave me a lot of opportunities to work on myself as well as interact with a lot of new people.