Are INTPs capable of falling in love, or at least something that they would feel comfortable identifying as "love"?
Are INTPs capable of falling in love, or at least something that they would feel comfortable identifying as "love"?
no.
they might not like to talk about it or use the word "love" but I'm sure they can feel it just as deeply as anyone of any other type. Love is universal. <3
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.-Mark Twain
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Yes
Mmm, not really. It was something an INTp ex said to me once, that he didn't feel he was capable of ever experiencing "being in love"... and as an ESFp, it completely baffled me so I wanted a few points of view.
Sorry for not having an epically tragic story to share.
- Maybe he wasn't really an INTp.
- Maybe he was, but was fucked up and incapable of loving.
- Maybe you're not really an ESFp.
- Maybe you are, but he "perceived" you as being fucked up and was incapable of loving you (and just said that to be nice).
- Maybe this had nothing to do with Socionics or personality typing.
- Maybe he was abused or had PTSD and was incapable of loving regardless of type (see reason #2 above).
- Maybe he was suffering from depression (It's not always obvious, and see reason #2 above.)
- Maybe <insert a million other reasons having nothing to do with Socionics or typology here>
- Maybe you're a bleeding heart liberal and he's an evil right winger (or vice versa) and he despised your politics and everything you stand for (see above)
Just because you find someone who's your dual doesn't mean that life will be happily ever after and that the birds will be singing and that the sun will always be shining. BTW, if I was breaking up with a girlfriend I could totally see myself using that "I'm not capable of loving anyone" bullshit excuse, because it diffuses a highly agitated Polr slapping situation on the INTp which is the most awkward thing for us and something we have no fricken clue whatsoever on how to handle.
Te-INTp/ILI, my wife: Fi-ISFj/ESI, with laser beam death rays for ESTp/SLEs, lol
16 years of bliss in an Activity relationship
ENTj ~**~ 7w6
i have no idea what steventj is talking about. i could easily see an ILI saying this. (which doesn't mean that this person is necessarily ILI at all).
this kind of statement mirrors what i might say, which would probably be along the lines that i have never experienced anything remotely resembling what most people would call love and do not understand the concept of love at all.
Uh, wow. No need for the hostility. There are a million counter-points I could offer up for that little outburst, but I'm going to let it go for a more relevant statement: The conversation sparked a curiosity in me that prompted thought about INTPs as a group, and love. I am not bitter or devastatedly wondering what went wrong, and I did not necessarily in relation to me or to us. If I had, I would have told my story up there and, being an ESFP, probably used lots of s.
Relevant, theoretical opinions, please.
wtf
Te-INTp/ILI, my wife: Fi-ISFj/ESI, with laser beam death rays for ESTp/SLEs, lol
16 years of bliss in an Activity relationship
Incapable of falling in love? Bloody hell, if I was incapable of falling in love, half my problems in life would be instantly solved. Seriously.
ILI (Indescribable Lovemaking Inc.)
5w4 so/sx
"IP temperament! Because today's concerns are tomorrow's indifferences!"
Lord Fnorgle's Domain - A slowly growing collection of music, poetry and literature.
Stickam music performances
You'll get a walrus to sing before you get a few INTp's here to admit they can fall in love. All of us are susceptible to it.
capable, yes. comfortable, i doubt it.
but i will speak for myself.
identifying and expressing feelings is a problem. more specifically, the problem is with knowing the boundaries of an emotion and of my own capacity for "executing it" while existing on this "tension wire" strung out by the memory (and fear of) of attraction/repulsion and connection/disconnection. if i think i would like to connect with a person, what steps do i take to connect? do i go towards someone, and if so, how how firmly do i step out? do i risk falling out of line with what i know in an effort to make my nondescript feeling clear, or to see what develops from the interest? or perhaps to win the love of another person? how do i clearly extract the concept of love from all the bullshit that accompanies and confuses it (i.e. expectation, sex, peripheral desires or feelings, needing a person for selfish reasons, etc.)? how do i know whether what i feel is at all proportionate to what someone else feels? if someone loves me, what is expected of me? is it expected that i will graciously acknowledge the feeling and adopt the sensitivity necessary not to hurt their feelings, even if it means lying?
these are some of the questions that plague me. now, to be clear, it's not that i don't feel for people or that i don't want to love people. besides, sometimes i get the wave of impulsiveness necessary for me to risk falling off the wire. in fact, being on the wire made possible by being roughly an infant in terms of emotional expression is, in itself, evidence of being prone to fall towards weak, untrue, unhealthy, or otherwise indecipherable experiences of love.
one minute, i feel things and suspect they might be roughly the things that define love, and am possibly tempted to pursue a "loving" connection. the next, i don't feel a thing. admitting to this fickle love is foolish, if you ask me. i am cautious to the extreme when it comes to love, or would like to be. but as i mentioned before, it's the nature of being on the wire to begin with that, i think, sets me up to fall. it is the fear that, despite my best efforts to maintain balance and to not cause undue distress in myself or another person, i could still fall and possibly even enjoy it until i hit the ground.
whenever the dog and i see each other we both stop where we are. we regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion and then we feign indifference.
Jerry, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
OMG guys, love is so easy.
It's like there niff. Pervading your brain man. Get with it.
D-SEI 9w1
This is me and my dual being scientific together
I might have said I'm incapable of love a few years ago, but one shouldn't expect to some sudden cognitive change when one is in suddenly in love. An INTp act perfectly as though they are in love with someone, but it would be wrong for them to think because they don't feel any raw emotion concerning the relationship, that the whole relationship is an everlasting void. There is no question that an INTp can feel love- its just not very discrete for ILI. Its immature to think that one can't love.
There, I want a singing Walrus dancing on ITG machine, all while smoking a cigar.
PoLR
Suggestive Function
Regular Double-shot Espresso Subtype
Just because I'm a thinking type doesn't mean I'm not an idiot.
Some really interesting insights, everyone, thank you. INTps are particularly hard for me to understand at times, and hearing it explained so well has been fascinating.
... more points of view are always welcome too, of course, if any other INTps (or anyone else!) see this and want to contribute.
Bailout = 64;
for(iX=0;iX<MaxX;iX++)
{
for(iY=0;iY<MaxY;iY++)
{
zReal = (float)(iX - CenterXJ) / ZoomJ;
zImag = (float)(iY - CenterYJ) / ZoomJ;
unsigned int iter = 0;
squared = 0;
while(iter <= MaxIterJ && squared < Bailout)
{
zReal = exp(zReal);
zImagv = zReal;
zImagv *= sin(zImag);
zImagv += cImag;
zReal *= cos(zImag);
zReal += cReal;
zImag = zImagv;
PowR = zReal;
PowR *= zReal;
PowI = zImag;
PowI *= zImag;
squared = PowR;
squared += PowI;
iter++;
}
if (squared >= Bailout)
{
printf ("Yes");
}
else
{
printf ("No");
}
}
}
}
...the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'.
INTp
Actually, I have a suspicion that love was invented by our civilization as a compensation for our instinctive isolating behavior. Therefore love is a drug that unfortunately does more harm than good. And also unfortunately I'm a total addict and don't ever plan on going into rehab. Of course, love always seemed to me to be something you feel when you find a normal relationship, where you can look into the future and never see the end. I've been hit so hard with feelings for a partner that it literally felt like my head was floating after she left and it brought me to my knees with uncontrollable sobbing later that night, but she was literally a drug herself and I knew it, though I constantly denied it. So no, I've never felt love, but I believe that I could.
Binary or dichotomous systems, although regulated by a principle, are among the most artificial arrangements that have ever been invented. -- William Swainson, A Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals (1835)
: (
I have this thing where I get attracted to people easily. When I date one of the people, I enjoy the experience for a short time. Then, after about a month and a half, I grow bored of them; but as soon as the relationship ends, I'm sad!
I think the best way to describe how relationships work for me is that I can be far too quick to assume a relationship exists. It sort of reminds me of how an INFp's Ti HA has been described as subscribing to a logical system too quickly without fully understanding it (or something like that, I can't remember what it is exactly now). But my point is that for me, I've experienced Fi HA in the same way with relationships (esp. romantic ones). Here's an example:
When I first signed up with match.com (something I'd previously never imagined myself doing) about half a year ago now, I found a profile I liked the look of so I started emailing her. We'd spent about two weeks messaging eachother back and forth, getting to know eachother and all that, and eventually (realising she wasn't going to take the initiative herself) managed to summon up the courage to ask her out, to which she agreed. So we went to a bar one evening and just sat there talking for a couple of hours (well, it was mostly her doing the talking, I was far too nervous to think of anything to say). Anyway, that was that and in my mind the evening had gone well. Now at this point, in my mind I already thought that the relationship had been established; as a matter of fact just from the successful conversation through email I began to think that a relationship was being established and that it just needed to go through whatever steps necessary to progress it from there. Obviously looking back on it I can see this wasn't the case, but that was my misunderstanding at the time.
Anyway, continuing the story, I'd sent her another couple of messages on match.com since then, although she hadn't read them so a few days later I decided to text her, to which she responded. She was at some festival thing in the city centre that evening so I said something to the extent of "Do you mind if I join you?" i.e. at the festival. At this point she took a long time to respond and eventually made up an excuse to say no and said "We can meet up again in the week if you want" to which I agreed and asked her when she'd prefer. Then I never heard from her again. Now at the time, this really confused me because, like I said, I already thought a relationship existed. So I started pondering reasons why she might not have responded and things like that, always assuming that she had tried to respond and couldn't or something along those lines. Fortunately for me, I happen to be good friends with an SEE coworker. One evening shortly thereafter we were working overtime and I was discussing the situation with her and telling her all the possibilities that I'd thought of as to why she hadn't responded to me. The SEE on the other hand was quite skeptical about the story from pretty early on and she was pretty suspicious that this girl I'd dated didn't want anything to do with me anymore and just hadn't said anything. Now at the time I was still foolishly optimistic about the situation, but after spending a couple of evenings dwelling on the situation, having taken my SEE friend's advice into account, the reality of things suddenly dawned on me and I finally understood how things really were, i.e. that this girl simply wasn't interested.
Sorry for the rather long example there, but as far as I understand things, that's one example of how Fi HA can be and how Creative Fi™ can resolve an issue with the Fi HA.
ILI (Indescribable Lovemaking Inc.)
5w4 so/sx
"IP temperament! Because today's concerns are tomorrow's indifferences!"
Lord Fnorgle's Domain - A slowly growing collection of music, poetry and literature.
Stickam music performances
@ BLauritson
interesting. i wouldn't say i'm usually similar, but could see the possibility of thinking a relationship is self-evident by manner of interaction, time spent together, and so on. however, i generally simply can't bring myself to think a relationship actually exists enough to confidently state that it exists in some definable capacity. i am notoriously noncommittal, and certainly shy away from defining relationships in a way that would make them rigid or inescapable, which to me is basically "any stated definition."
however, once much time has passed, and if i actually become invested in someone's life (and vise versa) then there tends to be more "knowing" without stating, but what i implicitly know often has nothing to do with what the other person "knows." it's quite the mess, to be honest. i don't spend a ton of time specifically doubting people's feelings for me, but rather, try to avoid the situation altogether by carrying on, sort of developing feelings and ideas on my own, but rarely knowing how to make sure we are on the "same page." the result is quite a few fleeting "friends with benefits" scenarios, although the friends might have said otherwise.
i do spend quite a bit of time in cost-benefit analysis. if i am investing time and effort into a relationship with someone, it should not be wasted. i react pretty badly to realizing i have wasted time with someone, and have to make it known to them right away and try to remove myself from the person's life. i say "try" because sometimes i never end things entirely.
whenever the dog and i see each other we both stop where we are. we regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion and then we feign indifference.
Jerry, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
Te-INTp/ILI, my wife: Fi-ISFj/ESI, with laser beam death rays for ESTp/SLEs, lol
16 years of bliss in an Activity relationship