I've been reading this forum for about a year, and finally decided to participate.

I've been familiar with the Myers-Briggs classifications for many years, and I found MBTI typology to be interesting but static. It didn't really predict how the various types would interact, nor did it seem to be based on anything other than a seemingly arbitrary classification scheme and a few anecdotal observations. Of course, people can be differentiated by a nearly infinite number of factors, but how useful are those classifications?

The impetus I had to learn more about personalities came from my divorce. Being an ENTJ, I had a list of requirements for the woman I would marry since I was twelve years old. By the time I was thirty, I found a woman who met those requirements. We liked each other, and we got married. Eventually, we got divorced, and I wondered what went wrong. We're still friends, still see each other every week or so, and still like (and love) each other, but we can't live together. Socionics is the second system that I have encountered that has anything to say about why two people whose "numbers" are the same, who love and respect and like each other, still might not be able to live together. The first system was Astrology, which said that an Aries (me) should never marry a Capricorn (her). But I think Socionics has a slightly better answer.

Socionics introduced me to the functions, and I have been very impressed with the way functions explain behavior. I suspect that the functions reflect underlying physical structures in the brain, but that is just a guess. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the insights I get from reading about the types, their interactions with each other, the functions, and the behaviors those functions drive. I'm actually getting to the point where I can guess the "types" of some people, and therefore get a head start on what I can and cannot expect them to do. The fact that behavior is not entirely random, or that a "type" represents a fairly predictable "suite" of behaviors, is a revelation to me.

If this sounds a bit robotic, please remember that I'm an ENTJ, and Fe is pretty far down on my list of talents, as is Fi. Since reading people does not come naturally to me, I have to fall back on having a system to understand them, with behavioral clues as input. Socionics seems like a pretty good system. I've been testing it constantly for the past year, and I've been very impressed.

Since I've learned so much from this site (and others), I hope to give something back, not, perhaps, in the form of theory, but possibly in anecdotes which might be useful to others.