Ashley writes:
Do you think, if we are always changing who we are based on new facts, can we ever sincerely invest ourselves wholeheartedly in a relationship? If our thoughts and perspective are always growing, how do we keep from out growing relationships? Do we out grown people easily? Do we move on without giving it thought?
I've tried to look into this, to find a mold that fits 'me', with no luck. I honestly do not understand the emotional aspect of INTP. Do we simply not care what feelings have to offer? Are we scared of them? Do we experience them more objectively? Do we find them pointless because they are passing with our mood? Are we really oblivious to others feelings or do we just not care that they have them? What rule do they really have in our lives?
Can INTPs love in an enduring way? If so, what do we love? That's your real question, right? You're asking whether lasting, romantic love can really be held and nurtured by INTPs, or are they so askew when it comes to emotions and our evolving nature that love will always wither in our hands? If we are always changing based on our growing understanding of the world, if we will always seek the new challenge and the next question, how can we possibly stay in one lasting relationship?
The truth is that we as INTPs do care. We do reciprocate. We do invest ourselves. So why does it feel so tortured and hard? The key is that for love to really explode, two people have to love the same or similar things. And INTPs seem to love something that most others don't.
Do you know the old saying that half of the fun is getting there? For INTPs, the getting there is almost all the fun. INTP is about a process for interfacing with the world. A posture. A particular set of actions and skills that we rely on. Imagine INTP like a traveling companion. INTP will have quickly and efficiently weighed and made decisions about many, many aspects the trip. The type of vehicle and why. What would maximize the route. The general plan for how often to get gas. What kind of restaurants and when. What the goal is. How best to reach it. However, INTPs are not hyper-organizers or list makers, but rather people who think about the fundamental nature of things. With that knowledge, INTPs then have comfort that in any particular situation, they will have a clear, calm, and controlled response. We have no need for lists, because of how easily we process and hold this type of information in our heads.
For INTPs, the particular place we're going at any given moment is not what we love the most. What we really love is the basket of skills and actions and decisions that go into achieving goals. That's why we throw ourselves totally into something, reach competency, then move on to something else. It we were all about the goal, we wouldn't move on. On the other hand, if we were about dreaming of possibilities without any real drive to achieve them, we would never reach competence. INTP nature is like collecting an awesome set of tools. Once we have them, we want to get out there and use them.
I do think that INTPs can love just as wildly and lastingly as any romance novel. However, we want a partner who can appreciate the tools and play with us. It feels safe and easy and exciting. We can accomplish more together, share some of the burdens. What we're doing on any given day and sundry disagreements that we may have are not very important to us if we have that partner in crime who knows where we are coming from, and how we get to where we're going. In a nutshell, INTP is more about the HOW than the WHAT. The WHY for INTPs is our faith in objective truth and measurable competence.
The confusion you feel is simply due to a conflict in love languages. What it feels like to be around people who don't love what you do. Yes, we know that INTPs struggle to deal with the rise and fall of emotions, but that isn't the core problem. The conflict of love languages only makes the emotional ups and downs more stormy. And as we know, we aren't super good at dealing with that. The situation can get very pained and dysfunctional and complex as we try to suppress our "dangerous" emotions and use our rationality to solve problems that really have an emotional, not intellectual basis.
The bottom line is INTPs are entitled to love what they want to love. If they're not finding it, the people they are with aren't resonant enough.
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