Honestly? It's about personal experience and psyche. It's not the game's fault, it's just that in real life the only people I've not had solid positive interactive with at least 90% of the time (aside from my mom, who I've had more conversations with than I can count, so ups and downs are expected) have simply been caustic people, so a game where learning to talk to more people could make it impossible to talk to someone you've known your whole life is abjectly terrifying to me. Meeting more people should make you better at communicating, not worse. :/ And I actually was being fairly rigid, as I was trying to maintain effective communication with the best friend, but even still it led to me being unable to meet my obligations to my village and the shop.
Maybe I'm just sheltered? It's worrying.