Response to comment

There's a difference between introverts and people who are just socially awkward/inept, even though there's some overlap. I'm an introvert, but I can talk, and I can certainly hold my end of an interview (either end, at that). I appreciate what you're saying about having to channel whatever extrovert you have to get ahead, and I've certainly had to do that, and recognize that a lot of things would be easier if I did it more.

You're right about RM: his being an extrovert was only one angle of the clusterf* living situation we'd gotten ourselves into. His lack of boundaries were a much bigger factor. And I'd gone back and forth between giving him the benefit of the doubt (just clueless) and doubting the benefit of the doubt (no, there's got to be some conscious manipulation going on here), and that article made me think about that again. When I think about that horrible episode when he walked into my office, approached me, sat down in front of the futon on which I was sitting, and put my foot in his hands--the whole time, from the minute he stepped in the room, I looked horrified--I think he must have registered that I looked horrified. But the article points out that extroverts don't do that. They don't survey the scene; they just jump in. That doesn't excuse his behavior, but it exposes my own bias in thinking about what he was thinking in terms of what I would have been thinking. Let me reword that: I often gave him crap, and rightly so, for refusing to put himself in my position as an introvert. It's not that I disliked him (at first); it's that I needed me time. How could he not get that? And then, there was I, months later, not being willing to get that his mind works in an entirely different way, so his behavior reflects different underlying beliefs than the same behavior would on my part.