I'm a lifelong introvert. Somewhere along the line, I picked up enough social cues to fool most people into thinking I'm a good talker, but the truth is that I'm exhausted by social interaction and am happy spending much of my time alone. I prefer spending time alone to light dating -- it's less tiring. That said, I enjoy being in serious or steady relationships. Right now, I'm single, but am very interested in a friend of a friend.
He's very intelligent, thoughtful, funny and unique in all the right ways. He likes me too two he has made it obvious to our friends and, in his way, to me, too. The problem is that we have pretty two levels of introversion. We're both more comfortable talking about highly complex theoretical issues he's a Ph. As a result, we are painfully awkward around each other.
We've both tried to have get-to-know-you conversations, but the interactions end up being painfully stilted -- even when we're both inebriated. The last time I dated an introvert, I played the drama queen. In exchange for his putting more info with my emotional outbursts, I mommied my then boyfriend.
That's the only way I know how to interact romantically with an this web page -- and I'm uninterested in repeating it. That leaves me in the dark. I find myself caring about this person deeply even though I don't know him well. I really want to ask him out on a date, but I'm afraid that it dating turn out be fatally awkward because I'm unwilling to play the role of the talkative self-explorer which would enable him to stay in his comfort dating as the questioner. Is there a solution?
Like a library date where we both read books and occasionally throw each other shy glances? Do I just need to swallow my fear, step out and express myself even though it's about as comfortable as walking two through glass dating insulation?
Or is it introverts true that an introvert needs to date an extrovert, a serious person needs to date a lighthearted one, etc.? Am I whispering up the wrong tree? Apparently what we have here is an area of human interaction -- courtship -- so completely colonized by extroverts that even an intelligent and thoughtful person such as yourself is only dimly aware that there might be alternatives.
And yet there must be alternatives. Otherwise, introverts would never reproduce. And I refuse to countenance the notion that these alternatives just take the form of painfully awkward reenactments of extroverted styles. There must be introverts way. For instance: I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but the introverts date sounds perfectly reasonable to me. As does the bookstore date. As does introverts being silent with each other. The other day I watched an attractive young couple come into a cafe.
The young man went to the counter and got some coffee drinks. The woman sat at click the following article table. The young man came back and they sat introverts their coffee drinks.
They looked at each other. They looked at the table. They looked around the room. They drank their drinks. They were quiet. They seemed comfortable with each other, and yet there was also a kind of intensity in the air.
They didn't say a word the whole time they were there. I wondered what was going on. I thought they might have just had a fight, or maybe just made love, or perhaps someone they knew had just died. But perhaps -- and this is what continue reading most intriguing -- perhaps this was nothing unusual at all.
Perhaps they were introverts introverts, recognizing that they had to click to see more out among the draining hordes, decided to contain their energy rather than filling the air with chatter. Perhaps they were together in a will flirchi fiest ph dating website valuable and that was enough.
Maybe it was enough to simply sit together. Had I dating been observing, their silence might have gone unnoticed, as the other people in the cafe were intent on each other and on their conversations, or their laptops or their books. Now, it's true that introversion is not the same thing as silence at all. It's not that introverts don't like to talk.
Two I'm suggesting, though, is that introverts must find ways to insulate themselves from the effects of a crowded, draining world, and one of those ways is to consciously resist the felt pressure to chatter. I see more encourage you to explore the boundaries of what is permitted to two people who simply like each other and want to be together. Why should you have to pretend to be extroverted?
Mindset Makeover
What you need, perhaps, is a manifesto, an explicit declaration granting you existential permission. It's sort of amazing, is it not, that just such an explicit set of alternate assumptions on behalf of introverts has not heretofore been widely promulgated? Could that be because the extroverted majority forces its arbitrary mode of behavior on us with such overwhelming and yet invisible force? And could this be analogous to the two that dating about gender and race were once so powerful and all-encompassing as to act upon us invisibly?
Can a Relationship Between Two Introverts Work?
And then one day it was all painstakingly disassembled and laid out on the floor before us, and we saw that what we had once considered "natural" was nothing more than the half-baked assumptions of a tyrannical majority. You want more? Ask dating advice or make a comment to Cary Tennis. Send a letter to Salon's editors not for publication. By Cary Tennis.
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