Originally Posted by
Adam Strange;1083189
Well, my understanding is that Gamma's are all about equality and democracy. Even trades, so to speak.
Thanks. I like your avatar. ENTJ's basically live as wolves, raiding the establishment for resources, so I can relate.
That's a hard question to answer. It presumes that we really understand what we actually want, which is very often different from what we think we want. She is not an introspective type, and I tend to ignore my feelings, and together that is not a recipe for exploring our fundamental beliefs. When we met, she was living in an apartment and I had a house. When I suggested that we get married, she said she didn't want to get married, she preferred living alone in her apartment, and we should just see each other a few times every week, trading off on where we slept. I realize that most guys would be more than OK with that, but I said it didn't sound like a relationship that could hold together. She admitted she was lonely and she was crazy about me, so she relented, we got married, had a son, and after some years, got divorced.
I don't think her requirements for a partner were any more clear than mine were. I'm pretty sure she wanted an intellectual equivalent, preferably an engineering type, because that's what her father was. I met that requirement. Also, I'm an ENTJ and make money the way most people eat and sleep, so now that we're divorced, she doesn't ever need to work again, although she prefers to. (Just to set the record straight, she didn't marry me for money. When we met, I didn't have very much. It took a few years for me to get up to speed. Also, we were both absolutely faithful to each other, so that wasn't a problem.) We are equally attractive and equally intelligent, although in different ways. We like each other, get along great (most of the time), and agree on almost everything, although we do have trouble working together. So, when I came home one day and there was a moving van in front of the house, I was quite surprised. Obviously, I had missed something.
I know what type she is. She is an ISTJ. This is the same type as my father and my son and a few of my friends and a couple of the people I work with (I'm surrounded by them! But that's OK because I generally like and appreciate them.) And this is a relationship of Supervision, or One-Sided Conflict, with her as the Supervisor.
Now, there are many people who have written in forums that people of any type can get along. I believe them. I got along fairly well with my father, although that might have been because we were never close. I got along great with my ex-wife, although I get along better with her now that she lives a mile away and I don't see her too often. And, of course, I get along with the people at work because I keep a set distance from them. So perhaps it is possible to get along with anyone, but only with increasing levels of difficulty as the inter-type relations grow more psychologically distant.
Before I discovered Socionics, I thought that getting back together with my wife was just a matter of me working harder to be the kind of person she wants, but then, where would that lead me? I already had had enough of a childhood where my father made it clear that it was not OK for me to be me.
I was talking to an IEI about buying some of her art and she asked me about my marital status (after the separation and before the divorce). I told her I was married but we were separated, and the IEI asked me if I wanted her back? I had never considered any other possibility before then, but suddenly realized that our relationship had been difficult on some levels when we lived together, and our best efforts hadn't changed that, and I actually didn't want to live in close proximity to my wife if things would remain the same, so I started divorce proceedings. Thank you, IEI, Agent of Change.
With respect to dualizing, prior to this last year, I believe I have had only one friend who was a dual. (In retrospect, I'm guessing that my two friends as a teenager were ESI and IEI) With the ESI, we would talk for hours every day after school, we would work easily on projects together, and it never got boring and we never had a conflict. We definitely made each other better people by being friends. I thought that kind of thing was a one-time deal, but in the past year, I've met two other ESI's (now that I know what to look for) and the interaction is almost exactly the same. Nearly complete mutual understanding and agreement and almost zero conflict, although there [I
are[/I] slight variations in style and interests between them. Thank you, Socionics. I definitely owe you.