As an introvert also, one way that I've tried to explain it to some of my friends and acquaintances who are extroverts is to say that I'd draw a distinction between anti-social and asocial. Certainly some introverts can be anti-social -- they generally dislike social situations, usually because they feel uncomfortable in them.

In contrast, I'd say that my definition of asocial is someone who is essentially neutral on social situations; they feel no compulsion to go seek out social interaction, but they aren't necessarily opposed to it when it does happen.

I have been asocial as long as I can remember. I was always perfectly happy doing my own thing by myself when I was a kid. Only child, living in the country, no neighbors in walking distance. In grade school, I had lots of friends and was fairly "popular", but I didn't feel any specific need to hang out with other kids all the time; I'd still run off and do my own thing. Around grade 7-8, I was still the same me, but I started to notice that the things I was and had been interested in weren't popular or acceptable anymore.

That didn't initially bother me, until the cliques and pressure cooker that is High School kicked in. The standard High School struggles pushed me way further into the realms of being anti-social. I basically decided that 95% of people were scum, and that figuring out who the 5% of people who weren't scum wasn't worth the effort.

I think that a chunk of that gets better in the senior year of High School, and then the difference between HS and going to college is night and day. I could have been comfortable returning to socializing right away in college, but I was still pretty shell-shocked. I still had a pretty grim outlook on humanity, which is a shame because I now realize that I should/could have been quicker to adjust my attitude.

By now, I'm still fully asocial in that I feel essentially no need to seek out social interaction, but I do enjoy meeting and getting to know new people and find that there are very few people that I dislike -- almost the exact opposite of my old 95%/5% evaluation. I'll never be the type that wants to go out and hob-nob with friends or random people every day, but I certainly wouldn't describe myself as anti-social anymore.

I don't think this guy is as clever or *cute as he thinks he is.

Adding video to channels (Cute) - requested by Trancecoach.