deprived mate who comes home from work too tired to talk, but it’s
harder to grasp that social overstimulation can be just as exhausting.
It’s also hard for introverts to understand just how hurtful their silence
can be. I interviewed a woman named Sarah, a bubbly and dynamic high
school English teacher married to Bob, an introverted law school dean
who
spends his days fund-raising, then collapses when he gets home.
Sarah cried tears of frustration and loneliness as she told me about her
marriage.
“When he’s on the job, he’s amazingly engaging,” she said. “Everyone
tells me that he’s so funny and I’m so lucky to be married to him. And I
want to throttle them. Every night, as soon as we’re done eating, he
jumps up and cleans the kitchen. Then he wants to read the paper alone
and work on his photography by himself. At around nine, he comes into
the bedroom and wants to watch TV and be with me. But he’s not really
with me even then. He wants me to lay my head on his shoulder while
we stare at the TV. It’s a grownup version of parallel play.” Sarah is
trying to convince Bob to make a career change. “I think we’d have a
great life if he had a job where he could sit at the computer all day, but
he’s consistently fund-raising,” she says.
In couples where the man is introverted and the woman extroverted,
as with Sarah and Bob, we often mistake personality conflicts for gender
difference, then trot out the conventional wisdom that “Mars” needs to
retreat to his cave while “Venus” prefers to interact. But whatever the
reason for these differences in social needs—whether
gender or
temperament—what’s important is that it’s possible to work through
them. In
The Audacity of Hope
, for example, President Obama confides
that early in his marriage to Michelle, he was working on his first book
and “would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the back of
our
railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle
feeling lonely.” He attributes his own style to the demands of writing
and to having been raised mostly as an only child, and then says that he
and Michelle have learned over the years to meet each other’s needs,
and to see them as legitimate.
It can also be hard for introverts and extroverts to understand each
other’s ways of resolving differences.
One of my clients was an
immaculately dressed lawyer named Celia. Celia wanted a divorce, but
dreaded letting her husband know. She had good reasons for her
decision but anticipated that he would beg her to stay and that she
would crumple with guilt. Above all, Celia wanted to deliver her news
compassionately.
We decided to role-play their discussion,
with me acting as her
husband.
“I want to end this marriage,” said Celia. “I mean it this time.”
“I’ve been doing everything I can to hold things together,” I pleaded.
“How can you do this to me?”
Celia thought for a minute.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking this through, and I believe this is the
right decision,” she replied in a wooden voice.
“What can I do to change your mind?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Celia flatly.
Feeling for a minute what her husband would feel, I was dumbstruck.
She was so rote, so dispassionate. She was about to divorce me—me, her
husband of eleven years!
Didn’t she care?
I asked Celia to try again, this time with emotion in her voice.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
But she did. “I want to end this marriage,” she repeated, her voice
choked with sadness. She began to weep uncontrollably.
Celia’s problem was not lack of feeling. It was how to
show
her
emotions without losing control.
Reaching for a tissue, she quickly
gathered herself, and went back into crisp, dispassionate lawyer mode.
These were the two gears to which she had ready access—overwhelming
feelings or detached self-possession.
I tell you Celia’s story because in many ways she’s a lot like Emily and
many introverts I’ve interviewed. Emily is talking to Greg about dinner
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