A questions for you: How do I go about a friendship with an NT?
Y'all are notoriously difficult to read and sometimes I can't tell whether I should proceed or not. I wrote in the ENFJ thread about how I had a blossoming friendship with an INTJ but then he left and our communications switched formats from face-to-face to emails. Because I wasn't getting any real-time input, it kinda petered out. I didn't want to be annoying and I didn't know if my persistence was welcomed.
What kind of feedback can I expect from an NT to know that you want to be friends? I'm going to be honest about this, I'm an NF with lots of Fe and I strongly believe in the fine art of
COMPROMISE. If I give a little, you've got to give a little. How can I have a mutually satisfying friendship with an NT without a bunch of hurt feelings (on both sides) and miscommunications?
Thanks!
As a supplement to the "economic" model of friendship raised by Nocturne ("economic" in the sense of how we
invest in friendships and how much
value we put on friendships), I would like to bring up for consideration the old psychological truism that you can only change yourself, not others.
When I consider friendships, I look at the balance of incentives and disincentives that
I myself offer people. Disincentives would be things like neediness, remoteness, argumentativeness, insistence on controlling the format and content of the relationship, etc. Incentives would be the opposite of those things.
If I find that I have few or no friends, then maybe it's time to be more flexible and increase the incentives that I offer people and try to reduce the disincentives. If I have lots of NF friends but wish to increase the number of NT friends in my life, then maybe it's time to look at the incentives and disincentives that I offer NTs in particular.
When considering any one individual friendship, naturally I also want to look at the incentives and disincentives that
my friend offers to
me in the relationship. If my friend is offering a lot of disincentives and very few incentives, then it may not be worth maintaining the friendship; it may require me to offer too many incentives in return to keep the friendship alive. Of course, I could try to negotiate the friendship and try to convince my friend to offer more incentives; but based on the old psychological truism that you can't change others, negotiation is probably going to have limited or no effect. In order to really change, my friend is probably going to have to find his own
internal reasons to alter the balance of incentives and disincentives that he offers friends.
So let's assume that I'm pretty flexible about the balance of incentives and disincentives that I'm willing to offer friends, and also let's assume that I have accumulated over time a broad variety of friends (NFs, NTs, SPs, and SJs). Then in the end, very likely my individual friendships will require very different kinds of incentives and disincentives from me (and I'll receive the same wide variety of incentives and disincentives from my friends): In some cases, I'll put up with very distant relationships, and in other cases I'll put up with very close and even claustrophobic relationships; in some cases I'll be very much in control of the friendship, and in some cases I'll relinquish a lot of control to my friend; and so on. And because the individual friendships will have different mixes of incentives and disincentives being offered and received, the individual friendships will probably play very different roles in my life: I'll see some friends on a daily basis, and I'll see others less frequently; some friends will serve as close confidantes, and others will be more like mentors (or I'll serve that role for others); and so on.
And in fact that's pretty much how my friendships have worked out. I agree with Nocturne that there's an economic component to friendship in that we work out economic "deals" with our friends by swapping incentives and disincentives until we find a good balance. However, I would also emphasize the fact that the decision about what mix of incentives and disincentives to offer is largely a one-sided affair. That is, I have little ability to negotiate with friends to change the mix of incentives and disincentives that
they offer. So it largely becomes a question of how much
I myself am willing to change
my own mix of incentives and disincentives that I offer to others. If I want more friends or a broader variety of friends, then I work at becoming more flexible with my incentives and disincentives. If I have lots of friends or even too many friends, then I can probably afford to tighten up my incentives or be more demanding of my friends (offer more disincentives).
Again, I see it pretty much as a one-sided affair. Across time, I've learned that it doesn't do much good to bitch at friends about how they should be better friends, or to whine about how certain groups of people need to work harder to conform to my ideals of friendship. All that bitching and whining just serves as one more disincentive that I'm offering to people and groups. I think it's more productive to look at the balance of incentives and disincentives that
I myself offer to the world and make changes there as needed in order to achieve what I want.
As I side note, I would add that I see a long-term relationship with a lover or spouse as working much the same way (though the mix of incentives and disincentives is much broader and the mathematics work a little differently).
FL