If the groundswell of support for these sentiments is any indication, Rauch may soon find himself the unwitting figurehead for an Introverts' Rights Revolution. We decided to have a few words with this author, who has clearly tapped into something important.

Rauch is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. His book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, was published in 2004.

I spoke with him in early January.

—Sage Stossel



Jonathan Rauch

Did anything in particular inspire you to write an article about this? An especially trying plane ride seated next to an extrovert, for example?

I don't think it was any specific incident. The idea was rolling around in my head for a while. To some extent, it was the result of being partnered with an extrovert and realizing that this was a daily source of tension. So I started organizing my thoughts on the subject. Another motivation was, basically, that I thought it would be funny.

It's interesting that you've found it a source of tension to be paired with an extrovert. I've read that introvert-extrovert pairings work well because the person who doesn't like to make small talk can just let the other person do it for them.

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That's true. It does work very well in some situations. But for an introvert it also makes for a constant—I guess you might call it "brain pressure." That's a better phrase than "tension," because tension implies conflict and it's not that. It's just that my partner Michael's default mode of being is to talk and interact all the time, whereas mine is to talk as little as possible. We've been together since 1996 and we've spent much of that time just learning how not to drive each other completely insane. Part of my motivation for writing this piece was to pass along some of what I've learned. I was also hoping Michael would read it, which he did.

Did it help?

By the time the piece was published he'd probably heard it all from me before. But it doesn't hurt to go on the record.

If he were a writer he could do the companion piece—"How to Care for Your Extrovert."

Exactly. But of course my view, as I say in the article, is that it's much easier for introverts to understand these things than extroverts. Extroverts really have a hard time "getting" it. And even when they do get it, they still have a hard time modifying their behavior.

You wrote that for a long time you didn't even realize you were an introvert. What caused it to finally dawn on you?

From about the age of eighteen or nineteen, when I went to college, I realized that it was just not my idea of fun to party. In fact, I couldn't see why anyone would want to—I get so monumentally bored at parties. So I realized that I had this fundamental difference with a lot of other people. I didn't put a name on it until a few years ago when a friend of mine, who reads a lot of Jung, informed me that he's an introvert and that, "by the way, Jonathan, you're an introvert, too." He explained what that means and suddenly a lightbulb went on and things fell into place.