Tonight my friends and I were discussing personality types and comparing our Myers-Briggs test results. As an ENFP, I live for these conversations. These are opportunities to explore friends. To get to know them better. And yet tonight something put me adrift.
What tipped it all off was our discussion of one particular friend's bad string of relationships. In a semi-joking manner, I offered that he draws to a specific type: in the order of crazy. And another friend, playing off my comment, poked, "Were they all ENFPs." In my stupidly immediate response I quickly defended that I was myself an ENFP. I immediately regretted the admittance, knowing this would yield a guarded answer when I asked why exactly she associated ENFP women with the crazy ex stereotype. I would later find out that it was because of our notorious failure to commit.
Now I will totally admit that I have this problem. As soon as I get settled in one idea, I am thinking about the next dream or destination. But to hear this problem to publicly exposed, I felt like I had been branded with four scarlet letters on my chest, announcing to the world my incurable deficiencies in romantic relationships. The grass is always greener, they say.
Which got me to thinking... do female ENFPs struggle to find people to date more than the average person? Reasons:
1. Power struggle. I want the man to take the initiative in the relationship. However, as an ENFP this is an immense test of patience. We see the goal, the potential, so why can't he just get with the program and ask me out already? Trying to restrain the inner lioness to give the poor boy a chance turns into resentment, and before you know it, you loath him for not getting the guts together to ask you soon enough, since you've already known each other a week!
2. Intuition that looks like a Pinterest wedding board. An ENFP's foresight and big imagination usually turns out wedding colors and adoption papers before we've learned a potential mate's last name. Crazy? No. Imaginative? Yes.
3. Attention. We are starved for it. So we come off as all those... oh, not so nice words. Smothering, clingy, attached, codependent. Yay! Sounds like marital bliss to me! Our extroversion puts us up for anything and everything. I find the "hard-to-get" card consistently missing from my play of hand. (It takes too long and is frankly boring.)
4. Competition. Those other women, the delicate followers who make the guys out to be heroes and naturally get their attention because they dote and preen over them. Or the other power women who are just hotter and don't leave you a damn chance because you're trying to be nice and warm and considerate and they are playing the bitch card and winning them all over. The men can't categorize us as fierce or soft because we are a balance of both, so we get ignored entirely.
5. Getting in our own heads. Quick to fall in love, we play out whole scenarios before they even happen and usually end the relationship prematurely because we've already had too many make believe fights and break ups to make it even worth it anymore. Really, it's exhausting.
All written out, it's no surprise that ENFP women are general super single. We are hot complicated messes, and who wants to figure all that out. So we'll just get back to ruling the world... until the next boy crush in 0.5 seconds.
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