Well, I don't casual-date, I know who I click with pretty quickly and if I'm not interested I stay detached. If I go out with anyone on a "real" date, it's because I'm seriously interested.
I think the zone of what I look for at this time in my life is pretty narrow. I need someone who I can connect with as a person but who isn't clingy/overbearing; lots of guys drift towards either extreme, they either want more or contribute less than what I'm looking for. But I've already been trapped in an unsuitable relationship once and learned my lesson, and I'm not going to do it again; it sucks, and it hurts both them and me.
I'm really good and really bad at relationships. I intuit and listen well, I'm sensitive to signals the other person puts off, I'm usually aware of what's going on with them or at least have some good guesses, I'm flexible and easy to live with, I'm undemanding and give people a lot of freedom, I encourage their individuality even if it results in us drifting apart and splitting. But I'm really bad at little daily affirmations of the relationship and sometimes feel smothered by them. When I'm with someone, I'm okay enough; but if we're not around each other, I tend to just be gone... I'm doing my own thing, I hate feeling hemmed in by text or phone or e-mail, I have to work to respond to connection signals. I do work at it, but I'm not good at it.
I'm also not going to mother a guy, even if I can tell he wants it, or make a guy the center of my life. I'm not interested in that sort of relationship whatsoever. I'll invest in the relationship, but I'm not going to be a cliche, I don't exist as someone else's "support," I'm egalitarian. I don't mind doing some conventional things as long as it's not demanded/expected of me and I feel I'm getting an equal investment back, but if I feel I'm being locked in a box/role or used, that's the end of it...
Another thing I've had to work at is letting others in. I usually am self-sufficient, even when I'm feeling crappy, and especially if intellectually there seems to be no reason to tell someone something, sometimes it's hard for me to let others share in my problems.
I guess my issue is that, no matter how hard I try, I feel inadequate to be a "warm" person; I am always going to exude some level of detachment and independence from even someone I really love, and if they cannot deal with it, then it's not going to work.
you'rewrongi'mright said:
I'm very good at putting myself in peoples shoes, and listening to what they have to say. I will go out of my way to make sure they feel like they have someone to rely on; however, it seems that most people, including some of my best friends don't reciprocate often.
Yes, in MBTI, that's really accentuated by strong Ne; and then the Thinking aspect allows me to see and understand what is happening and often give very good context and advice to help the people talking to me.
In a relationship, this is one of the worst things ever. I need to know I can rely on someone for support when I need to vent about something, I rarely do it anyways, so when I want to, you know it's important to me.
Well, you just did trigger a memory... the other week my bf came over and I was actually opening up and starting to tell him about something that was a pretty big deal to me that day because I really needed to talk to someone ... and after seeming like he was listening, out of the blue, he saw my external hard drive box (it had just arrived that day) and goes, "oooh, what did you get that for? Is it cool?" and then started asking me questions about the drive. I was just sort of dumbfounded and answered the questions succinctly but pretty much just shut up at that point. Sometimes it takes me awhile to get my thoughts together enough about emotional situations; writing is easier for me, speaking in real-time is harder; so if you shut me down as I'm struggling through it, it derails it. (In his favor, after the discussion of the hard drive ended, he realized he bulloxed things and came back to asking me what was up...)
They never made me feel comfortable doing so, and the rational part of me alway said " This is something that can be solved easily, you don't need to discuss it".
Yeah, that. It's far easier, much of the time, to just keep it in and figure it out yourself, plus if the answer seems rational, why do you need to tell anyone anyway? It took me a long time to make allowance for my emotional state and realize I needed sometimes to just vent or get things out... that I just couldn't slough things off... people are holistic, not one-dimensional. It's just that rational detachment automatically is used to boxing up the emotional content of things (except as factual indicators of someone's mood) and setting them to the side, in the attempt to be "objective."
I ended up keeping everything to myself, and felt like I was only there for them, and not myself, basically, just along for the ride. ( this is when I was still really young, inexperienced, and had a hard time being myself)
Yes... "self needs" are illegitimate, plus I should be able to buckle down and deal with it alone, myself, rather than dragging someone else into my mess. It seems that embracing a relationship and embracing self means also accepting that the self has needs and that the commitment itself means something in terms of responsibility to each other. There's accepted reciprocity there. But that doesn't sit well with an autonomous spirit; I still don't quite get it.