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The Right One for You

The Right One for You

By Donna Dunning

Can personality type help you find an ideal partner?

Lately I am seeing many discussions on the importance of finding the “right type” to love and marry. The idea behind these “ideal” matches is that people with certain personality type preferences are naturally more compatible than other combinations. Although I believe it is useful to know and accommodate personality preferences in our various life relationships, I become worried with these prescriptive approaches to interactions.

My three main concerns are:

• People are so much more than their personality preferences. They grew up in a family, community, and culture. They have interests, values, skills, knowledge, habits, attitudes, and lifestyles. They have approaches to money management, working, playing, learning, and living that are associated with much more than their personality type preferences. To look for the “right type” is just way too simplified.

• When people already in a relationship find they are listed as “incompatible” they may take this advice to heart and consciously (or unconsciously) sabotage the relationship. We all have heard of the power of belief and of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Think your relationship won’t work? Then it likely won’t. I don’t like to think people will give up on a relationship because they believe they found the “wrong type” and the relationship is doomed to fail.

• On a similar note, it becomes too easy to use “personality type” as a scapegoat to avoid working on issues. This gives people permission to just blame your natural incompatibility and move on. When the going gets tough, you have a great excuse to get out of the relationship.

I believe there is no magic personality type combination for a perfect relationship. No matter how “matched” your personal preferences may be, there will be tough times and stresses in any relationship. Successful long-term relationships require effort, compromise, and dedication. So rather than looking for the “right type”, find the right person who accepts who you are and is willing to commit to the relationship. Then do the same for them as you journey through your lives together.

If you are looking for ideas on how to communicate more effectively, Introduction to Type and Communication helps you understand communication preferences. If you live in the USA, Introduction to Type and Communication is now available on Kindle.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 10:28 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Right One for You”

  1. CT says:

    This is my 2 cents worth of thought.

    There are two layers in a relationship:
    1. In mind/ in heart: Ease of understand each other. There are types that are more “compatible” in terms of how easy they can understand each other message and reasons (or lack of reasons) of decisions. For instance, it is relatively easier for N to understand another N, but not so easy to understand another S. Of course, there are other factors more than just personality types, i.e. social class like rich vs poor, races and culture Chinese vs African, etc. “Ease of understand each other” can provide a good foundation of relationship, but it is not enough for a good relationship.

    2. In day to day life: Accepting/ compromising/ adjusting for characters, habits, attitude, ways of life of each others. This is more than the function of personality types. And this is the much BIGGER PART of relationship. It takes years to adjust oneself (mental and ways of life) constantly to be in a good relationship, and such has much more to do with types. An “easy/ compatible” type, itself is not enough.

    One may find a type that is “compatible”, which I believe, that is only “useful” in some ways to make a relationship slightly “easy to maintain”.

    AND those in a good relationship knows, it is simply more than just about an “easy way to maintain” a relationship.

  2. Donna Dunning says:

    Hi CT. Good points. Managing day to day life is indeed the bigger and more challenging part of a meaningful, long-term relationship. Thank you for sharing your insights.

  3. Chikala says:

    I can think both logically and creatively. I fall in ENTP sometimes and ENFP so I guess that makes me a ENxP. I bounce back and forth depending on my mood. T’s are good at logic and hard cold facts, and F’s are good at building connections and empathizing.

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