Love's in the air....yes, that means a lot of ya'll getting ready to get crazy and let your horniness show! Not judging or hating just observing....somebody got to make sure the pot doesn't boil over.
Anyway as you get ready to love the one you're with and knock da' boots, enjoy this fun read that I saw while delayed at the airport.
Are you looking for
love or waiting for love to find you?
If you’re a quiet introvert who prefers sitting in the corner, and if
you’re accustomed to feeling like you’re always overlooked, having the
high beams of an extrovert’s attention turned on you can be flattering,
if not blinding. It’s hard not to be drawn in when the center of
attention wants to share the spotlight with you, and it’s hard to resist
a forceful
personality reaching out and pulling you in.
On one hand, this is fine. Many introverts are not comfortable being
the pursuer in relationships. Dan, a 44-year-old computer tech who
married an extrovert he met on the job, says, “Given that I was/am also
shy with women,
dating an
introverted
woman would have been difficult and long. Actually the dating wouldn’t
have been bad, getting around to asking her out would have been long and
difficult.”
Ray-Mel, who was first pursued by his wife, says, “I think someone who approaches someone else is by nature
extroverted. . . .
Recovering from a rejection isn’t as difficult as it is for someone who
is more introverted and finds it hard enough to make an approach at
all.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing you’re not the
pursuer type. It’s the kind of self-knowledge that can put you on the
path to a happy ending. Many of the introverts I spoke to said that they
did tend to be the pursued rather than the pursuer, but some also
realized that it meant they didn’t always make conscious choices in
their relationships. “I’m very shy and too afraid of
embarrassment
to put myself out there,” says 17-year-old Niza. And so even though
she’s not interested in super-friendly guys who have lots and lots of
friends everywhere, she usually ends up with talkative extroverts.
“Which is probably why we didn’t work out,” she says. “I always get
bored or aggravated with the person and dump him.”
Because of our tendency to let others take the lead, we are at risk
of being sucked into relationships we might not have chosen if we’d
given it more thought.
We’ve already talked about why introverts can be appealing to
extroverts: We let them have the spotlight, we listen to them, and the
rapt attention we are capable of providing (or at least faking) is
irresistible to an attention-hungry extrovert. And some extroverts
genuinely need us (whether or not they’re aware of it) to help them slow
down sometimes. “It’s easy for her to get pulled a thousand ways by
people,” says Nancy about her “large-and-in-charge” wife. “To have
someone who can be quiet with her is really a healthy thing for her.”
All this is 100 percent A-OK. If you find nourishment in the energy
of an extrovert, if you enjoy basking in a reflected spotlight, if you
are endlessly entertained by extroverted antics, or any of the other
myriad reasons you might be drawn to extroverts, then let that extrovert
woo you and enjoy.
All I suggest is that if you are going to be drawn into an
extrovert’s whirl, be sure you do it consciously and for the right
reasons. Don’t just fall in love with someone loving you, if you know
what I mean. Actually, that’s probably good advice for anyone, introvert
or extrovert. But because introverts are less likely to stick their
necks out to make connections, we can be more easily drawn into an
extrovert’s attention without considering whether it’s the kind of
attention that feeds our souls.
Among the risks of letting the extrovert choose you is that after the
initial thrill of your undivided attention wanes, the extrovert might
wait for something more exciting to happen, leading to hurtful
disappointment. Or you might learn that you enjoy all that fuss and
bother only to a degree and after a while find yourself wondering
irritably why this bundle of noise and energy doesn’t just calm down and
read a book or something. (Granted, you might grumble about that
sometimes even if the relationship is generally successful. Just as your
extrovert might sometimes wish you would put out a little more energy
around people. No relationship is without frustrations, and that’s fine,
if they’re fleeting.) You might tire of sharing your loved one with his
or her three hundred closest friends. You might get tired of being
dragged to parties, or your extrovert might get tired of having to be
the engine of your mutual
social life.
You might even find you feel threatened by your outgoing extrovert’s easy charms with strangers. In an online essay, “
6 Things Every Extrovert Secretly Has to Deal With,”
extroverted writer Macy Santo Domingo complains that “People will often
assume you’re flirting,” even when you are just being your ordinary,
outgoing extroverted self. This is a problem for her, she continues,
when her friendliness is “misinterpreted as something more, especially
when the person you are talking to gets offended that you are not, in
fact, hitting on them.”
Some extroverts might have a flirtatious manner that they have
trouble turning off whether or not they intend to flirt. While this
might be a little irritating for the extrovert, it can feel deeply
threatening for an introverted partner who perceives
flirtation and its attendant attention differently.
Of course, you also have to trust your gut because while it could be
your extrovert is just being friendly, it also could be genuine
flirtation. If it is flirtatiousness, use your gut again to determine
whether it’s all in fun or an actual threat. And regardless of whether
it’s a genuine threat or not, if you dislike it and the extrovert is
unwilling to ratchet it back for your peace of mind, then you get to
decide if you’re OK with this in your relationship.
If any of these relationship breakdowns happen, it’s important to
remind yourself that it’s just part of finding your way to love. An
extrovert might choose you, but you always have the option to opt out if
the fit is wrong. If the extrovert you were dating ultimately found you
dull, don’t take his or her word for it without first asking yourself
what this person’s criteria for “interesting” are. They might be
entirely different from your own, and entirely different from the person
you want to be. In other words, you’re not dull just because this
person thinks you are.
Actually, the person might be reacting to something that has little
to do with you. My friend Carol Lennox, LPC, a therapist in Austin,
Texas, points out that problems in the relationship often trace back to
childhood
stuff. An extrovert who was neglected as a child might be drawn to
introverts because that lack of attention feels familiar, she says.
“This hooks into the childhood pain and makes them angry at the
introvert, who may be simply being themselves.”
In his classic
self-help book,
Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples,
Harville Hendrix points out that most of us look for mates who are like
the people who raised us, in order to do it right this time. “Our old
brain . . . is trying to recreate the
environment
of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect the
past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling
need to heal old childhood wounds.”
In that case, by choosing you, the other person may be subconsciously
opting in to a relationship that has problems built right into it from
the get-go. And you may or may not be doing the same thing, depending on
whether you are genuinely attracted to the relationship or if you just
allowed yourself to get sucked into it.
Sound like pretty heavy stuff? Well, there’s not a lot in the world
that’s heavier than choosing the person with whom we feel safe to be
ourselves, which is one good reason to wait until we have a reasonably
mature view of our needs and wants before we set our life-love path.
Getting to know oneself that well can be a long and difficult process,
often learned through a lot of trial and error, which in relationships
can also mean an awful lot of hurt.
If you frequently find yourself in relationships with friends or
lovers who make you feel small and less-than, or if you find yourself
frequently exhausted in the relationship from the effort of maintaining a
persona the other person expects, maybe you’re letting others choose
you rather than choosing to be with people who make you feel wonderful.
It might be time to step back and think a little bit: What do you want
in a relationship, and is that what you are finding? Are you settling
for not-quite-right relationships because they find you?
Excerpted from Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After.
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