Adronitis
n.
frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from and what they do for a living.
In Ancient Roman architecture, an andronitis is a hallway connecting the front part of the house with a complex inner atrium. One quirk of Roman houses is that all the rooms in the front have Greek names, but all the back rooms are in Latin—as if your outer self and your inner self are speaking in completely different languages. Pronounced “ad-roh-nahy-tis.”
