Introverts in love
I was completely wogboggled to find out that Jonathon has a mobile phone. I guess it’s a living-in-Japan thing. I won’t go near the wretched things myself. Cannot imagine anything more intrusive, or more likely to make me enemies: I had to teach myself to bite back my instinctive annoyance at interruptions, when I entered the work world.
By and large, I’m in sympathy with Jonathon’s post. But this parenthetical bit I absolutely had to push back at: “the ideal relationship (between introverts who can intuitively share their thoughts and feelings).”
Jonathon. Dude. Wrong. Wrong ever so. Introverts are introverts, not mind readers. Trust me on this one.
Yeah, sure, I can finish David’s sentences with some regularity and rather better than random correctness. That is not a function of “intuition” or anything related to introversion. It’s simply a function of twelve years of interaction and shared context. A pair of twelve-years-involved extroverts doubtless finishes each other’s sentences as well as David and I do.
But if I tried to “intuit” his thoughts and feelings on a grand scale, or he mine, we’d be divorced. It just doesn’t work that way. Not even for introverts.
This is the danger of courting an extreme introvert, in fact, it seems to me. We’re so comfortable in our own minds we forget that others don’t have immediate access to our thoughts the way we do. Not only do we not give out our thoughts while we’re forming them—we forget to do it once they’re formed.
Eventually, a couple just becomes a couple of people in a couple of different worlds, people who barely notice each other. Dreadfully, dreadfully easy trap to fall into. Been close to it myself once or twice. Intuition hasn’t pulled me out of it, ever. Neither has familiarity or shared context. And David’s and my off-the-scale introversion deserves considerable blame for the problem in the first place.
What solves the problem is breaking the introverted shell. Acting and reacting openly, not just in the privacy of my own mind. Uncomfortable? Yeah, sometimes. Necessary? Absolutely.