Hello, everyone. ENTJ here.

[Adam Strange]

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.

[Velvet]

Hello and welcome. What type do you think she is?
There can also be ENTJs with a better developed Fi, usually after dualizing.
Also Fe role is something to consider in socionics.

[Amber]

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.


Hi,

it doesn't sound robotic. BUT do you think her requirements were just as clear as yours? do you think you met them?

[wacey]

welcome to 16t

[Limitless]

I didn't think it sounded robotic at all. And, for the record, even mentioning that does show a little bit of tact so there's nothing to worry about. Anyways, welcome and it's thoughtful of you to be willing to "give back" and help other people on the forum like that!

[Adam Strange]

it's thoughtful of you to be willing to "give back"

Well, my understanding is that Gamma's are all about equality and democracy. Even trades, so to speak.

welcome to 16t

Thanks. I like your avatar. ENTJ's basically live as wolves, raiding the establishment for resources, so I can relate.

Do you think her requirements were just as clear as yours? do you think you met them?

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.

What type do you think she is?
There can also be ENTJs with a better developed Fi, usually after dualizing.
Also Fe role is something to consider in socionics.

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 are slight variations in style and interests between them. Thank you, Socionics. I definitely owe you.

[wacey]

are[/I] slight variations in style and interests between them. Thank you, Socionics. I definitely owe you.

They represent close friends whom I lost and I like the symbolism. Sorry to hear about your ex wife. :/

[blackburry]

Upbringing and life experiences also greatly plays into personality and conflict resolution.



Also.. You believe(d) in astrology as a means to rationalize why you and your ex wife did not work out? ....why?

[Velvet]

Mkay that was a lot of information... sorry for you marriage. Her wish to keep her privac or to lead an independent life isn't that surprising, at least for me.
Did you get to understand why it did not work, why she left? It's a bit rude to move out without discussing things upfront.

[Adam Strange]

Sorry to hear about your ex wife. :/

Thank you. However, I think we're both happier now, overall, and we are free to move on, so divorce turned out to be a very good thing.

Upbringing and life experiences also greatly plays into personality and conflict resolution.

Yes, indeed. Both of us had fairly difficult relationships with our parents (who doesn't?), and they did not have the best parenting skills (who does?), so we didn't have good examples to follow. However, she was seeing a shrink when we met, and he helped both of us understand some of our problems and how to do better. My ex-wife actually did a terrific job of working on the relationship and on helping me see that some of my assumptions were really bad. However, we were ultimately not able to communicate well enough to resolve our differences and live together. I mean, we went through years of therapy and dozens of self-help books, and were not able to advance past a certain point in understanding. This is actually why I like Socionics so well. It identifies the points of contention between types, and implies that if you don't want to live as another type in order to get along, your best bet is to maintain a set psychological distance to minimize conflict. With respect to what you can expect in this kind of situation, it is sort of like a Secure living with an Avoidant. The Avoidant will never close the distance to degree that the Secure wishes, because they view themselves, not as being unable to achieve intimacy, but rather as being independent (a good thing, of course), and think that the Secure person is just smothering them at a closer (normal) distance. If the Secure is willing to live at the distance set by the Avoidant, that is fine, but that is never going to be as satisfying to the Secure as living with another Secure.

Also.. You believe(d) in astrology as a means to rationalize why you and your ex wife did not work out? ....why?

No, actually, that was a joke. Maybe my humor is a little dry. My degree is in Astrophysics, so I tend to have real doubts about the ability of planetary alignments to influence character traits.
I will say that I think the jury is out on the ability of the seasons of the year or the length of the day during early childhood development to influence character, but I think the effect, if any, is subtle.

We might finally have a Te subtype LIE.

You're right. How did you know? Does this mean that there are no other ENTJ-Te's on this forum? My Socionics test says I'm an ENTJ-1Te, my enneagram test says that I'm 8w7, 3w2, 6w7 (whatever that means), my Narcissist test scores me as 15 where a true Narcissist scores 20 or more, and the sniff test says I shower regularly. Also, my friends tell me I need better filters.

What did you think before? That all people are innately the same, or just that something other than "type" accounted for the differences?

I thought that people varied randomly on all axis' of personal traits, with some modifications from environmental influences. Give that Socionics has identified eight functions, that would make for 8! variations, or 40,320 distinct types, at which point it would be useless to try to classify people. Somewhere along the line, someone (Beebe, I think) decided that all combinations of functions are not allowed and this, if it is true, reduces the Socionics classification scheme to a manageable sixteen types. And the really interesting part is that the interactions between these few types are predictable. I've been testing the theory by observing interactions between people whose types I know (because they took the test) and it holds up amazingly well. Like Gravity, the theory works whether people believe in it or not.

Mkay that was a lot of information.

Yes. Sorry for the wall of text.

...sorry for your marriage. Her wish to keep her privacy or to lead an independent life isn't that surprising, at least for me.
Did you get to understand why it did not work, why she left? It's a bit rude to move out without discussing things upfront.

Thanks. I think moving out was an extremely hard decision for her. As I said, we love and care for each other, we just don't mesh well when we are at a close psychological distance for any length of time. So springing this on me without telling me made it easier for her to take a difficult step that she felt she needed to take, and avoided the real danger of being talked out of it. She did the right thing, and things are better now. We're still friends, and still help each other if asked.
I've since asked her why she thought it didn't work out, and she doesn't really have a coherent answer. My best guess as to why it didn't work out comes down to three reasons. One, she told me when we met that she didn't want to live with me. I should have listened. Two, we were in a relationship of Supervision, and that can be seriously not good. Three, we didn't know we were in a relationship of Supervision, so we couldn't clearly identify what was wrong and take effective steps to keep from getting on each others nerves. In Supervision, both parties can like and admire each other, but the Supervisor rubs the Supervisee the wrong way, just by being themselves, and the Supervisee rubs back in blind retaliation. I only discovered Socionics in the course of trying to discover what went wrong, after she left. The shrinks were useless here. Supervision might not have been the only problem we had, but it was the main one, because the inability to determine why we communicated with such misunderstanding, when both of us had the best intentions and were trying really, really hard to make things work, made finding a solution much harder.

[Contra]

We might finally have a Te subtype LIE.

You're right. How did you know? Does this mean that there are no other ENTJ-Te's on this forum?

There aren't that many ENTjs on the forum at all. Theres maybe like one other ENTj-Te... but I don't know who that is. So yeah, you're the only other self-typed ENTj-Te, as far as I know. Not sure why I'm replying to this... but here you go.

[wacey]

awwwhh.

[FreelancePoliceman]

Welcome, @Adam Strange. I hope you find Socionics to be more useful than MBTI. How useful did you find astrology, incidentally?

Obviously, with enough effort and willingness on both sides, any relationship can work. But you may be interested to know that Socionics considers relations of “duality” especially fruitful for both friendships and marriages. Assuming you’ve typed yourself correctly, your dual would be an ESI, or ISFJ. Perhaps a good way to start would be to read descriptions of the ESI type and familiarize yourself with it — you should generally feel a sense of contentment and connection with them, if you happen to meet any in real life. Typing your ex-wife might also provide insight into Socionics; very commonly marriages fail due to type incompatibilities. It may be, for instance, that you married another thinking type, and you weren’t able to adequately provide each other the emotional support and life you each needed.