People who feel relief when plans get cancelled aren’t necessarily antisocial. They may have spent years saying yes to things they didn’t want, and their nervous system learned to celebrate the rescue

Cancellation relief can feel almost identical to good news arriving. The same person who agreed to the plan two weeks ago, with apparent enthusiasm, exhales when the text comes through saying something’s come up. Both things are true at once, and the distance between them is where the real story lives.

This response often gets misread as introversion, social anxiety, or a creeping antisocial streak. Those explanations can be true for some people, but they do not explain every case. Plenty of socially comfortable...