You’re three minutes into telling someone about the connections between neurodivergence and mycelium. Your hands are moving. Your speech has sped up in that way it does when a subject finally has enough traction to carry itself. And somewhere around minute two, you noticed it, the slight glaze in their eyes, the weight shifting toward the door, and a small, familiar ache showed up right behind it: they don’t actually want this. They’re just being polite. I’m too much again.
That ache comes from a quiet, understandable assumption: *if this is intimacy, they should be feeling it too. *If they’re not lit up the way you are, something must have gone wrong. Either you overshared, or they don’t actually care, or the connection you thought was happening wasn’t real.
None of those has to be true. There’s a simpler explanation that a lot of the “infodumping is a love language” discourse skips right past: **infodumping can be real, genuine intimacy, and still be entirely one-directional. **And this can be a relationship-saving and shame-stopping realization.
What “Intimacy” Means If Not Mutuality
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