Have you ever taken the Meyers Briggs test? A real one, not the facebook style ones you can get, which I am not sure are completely done right. I took my first one when I was in college many moons ago, and I am an INFP.
A lot of the times, I fit just fine into this profile. Sometimes, I suspect my blog personality is not as "I" as it could be, and I think that's because for the most part, especially lately, I tend to consider the blog a private place (I know; that's silly because it IS NOT actually private. It's a disconnect of blogging for me). The big difference is that generally, if it's on this blog, it's not really something that reveals that much of me, in reality. I've put details on past blogs like parts of my body that were sore or getting into an argument with a friend over drinks or something that might seem super private but those are details that, to me, don't mean all that much about who I really am. I can be super-sensitive, and get my feelings hurt (and sometimes never totally get over it) over small things to other folks, and I think, because I don't always talk about it and definitely try to not bring it up every single time we fight, people forget about this aspect of my persona.
Anyway, the main point of this post is to talk about my hubby & I. Andrew tends towards a flip flop on the first two categories, but then on the last two is a TJ. Totally opposite of me, and sometimes we rub up against friction for those reasons. I don't particularly notice the teeny tiny toys scattered all over the floor; Andrew sees them and goes nuts about it because he worries about whether someone will fall & hurt themselves on them. I would worry about the falling part if I thought about it, and that's a really good way to point it out to me because then I DO care, and will, from then on, attempt to fix the issue.
I suspect that if we really looked more deeply into descriptions of this kind of thing it would help, at least me, be more aware of how to compensate for those moments in marriage, (or even in friendships) when personality type issues make us fail to see each other's points of view. I want, very much, to make things better, and try most of the time to be an ideal of myself, and try very hard to be kind, as often as possible. But when I do FAIL, I'll bet it's because something just hasn't registered as important to a bigger picture, and that teeny detail (to me) seems huge to someone else.
I take comfort in the fact that AA Milne, the man who wrote Winnie the Pooh, is supposedly an INFP. Yeats, Shakespeare, and Keats are supposedly INFPs too. So a lot of writers, and good company to be in, apparently. I wonder how often Shakespeare's wife yelled at him for leaving his quills all over the place.
