There’s a quiet assumption behind most relationships:
That if the feeling is strong enough, everything else will follow.
For idealistic types like INFJ and INFP, they take this to the maximum limit.
But this is where things start to go wrong.
Because love can be real, deep, and even transformative…
Yet still exist between two people who are fundamentally incompatible.
The problem is that most people don’t actually know what compatibility is—only what it feels like to be in love.
They mistake this love for compatibility, and those two things are not the same.
Compatibility is a measure of your ability to be friends with your partner
Most of the time love ends badly for INFJ INFP. It’s because they’re stupid in the head, they go too far with love to the hilt. They don’t want to feel good. They want to feel magic all the time, over the moon. Anyway, compatibility, when you’re compatible with a person, it simply means that you can be friends with them. And friends get along easily. Why? Because they don’t love each other. The trick is to have this friendship with a person you feel mad love for too. This is true love.
Can you see yourself sucking my dick for 300 years? Because I live a long time.
Compatibility makes love last. Simple as that. Which means you have to like the other person in addition to loving them. It keeps whatever erotic attraction is there alive. Because in addition to dick-sucking and pussylicking, you just can step aside from all that debauchery for a while, and find that <<Hey, I really like talking to this person —they’re interesting!>>
Mark Manson and Nietzsche said some interesting things about relationship. Nietzsche said that it is the lack of friendship, not the lack of love that makes for bad marriages. Mark Manson said something about communication preferences being the make-or-break deal of compatibility with another person, which makes sense. It’s not something that is usually considered in the saucy mix of love and sex compatibility, but there is a parallel here —-can you talk to this person for a thousand years and still not want to cut their head off when they open their mouth. Do you like their mind? Do you like their individuality? Do you like who they are as a person? This is typically expressed through the mind.
Are you mentally attracted to them? Do you like what they have to say? Do you like the way their mind works?
Continuing, do you like what they like? Shared interests. But not just any shared interests, the most important shared interests, ideally one shared interest that dominates the mind of each person, say, an interest in psychology and what makes the human animal tick. Friends share a common interest that they put above their own selfish love for each other. If you don’t have this, then the relationship is doomed to die, but before that, because you love the other person, it is doomed to die the most insufferable death imaginable — the death by love. You know what I’m talking about dear romantics. This is where you can’t leave the other person alone and you want to extract out of them an interest in what you are interested in because you can’t leave them alone (because you love them) and you keep trying to get some inchoate need met because love is on a timeline and it’s always doomed to fade, so you’re just trying to ride that wave as long as you can so you don’t have to go back to the world of being alone and feeling normal again.
Do you like what you love?
Well, if you can like the other person, then I got good news for you. You don’t have to ever go back to that world again, because like keeps the love alive. And as a matter of fact, it enriches it and raises it up to the level of the spiritual. Or if you don’t believe in that, it just cultivates and civilizes the primary impulse of love attraction into something rarified and nice. So that it can continue in a nice way rather than die hard on the rocks of hell. Which is where it’s going if you can’t be friends with the other person.
Now there is the opposite phenomenon as well, and I suspect some of you INFJ INFP dunderheads are going to raise that old question of <<Yeah, but isn’t a relationship that is just based on friendship and liking the other person going to be lacking in that vitalizing romantic spark? We can’t be satisfied with that, it’s too temperate and mild and blasé and lacking in passion blah blah blah?>>
Yeah, but who the fuck said you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Why are people always going to one extreme or the other? I’m not.
As a matter of fact, I’m going so far as to say that forming a relationship just based on friendship and liking the other person is like throwing out the baby with the bath water, it’s a fruitless victory, it’s like yay, who cares.
No, the real challenge here is to have both. You must have both the red hot sex, plus the ability to talk to this beast of the species at the same time. Well, not at the same time, unless that’s your thing. Picture this. You just had the most erotic kinky satisfying sex with someone, then when it’s all over you cuddle up and begin to talk about your interests in biomechanics or something like that. You discuss the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s new play. You talk about time travel. You talk about the human condition. You know, things INFP INFJ are likely to talk about.
Whatever your thing is. You talk and the other person magically, not only listens, but has interesting things to say back to you on the matter at hand. Before you know it you’re having lunch and the day is passing timelessly away and you’re happy. You’ve even forgotten about love. But it’s still there —hiding behind like. Hahaha.
<<Aha! What are you some kind of genius, Blake?>> You might be asking. Yes, or rather no, it’s just common sense, and I don’t know why it has taken the human species so long to not arrive at both sides of a dichotomy and stay stuck there. Now, Michael Bolton famously asked in the 80’s <<How can we be lovers if we can’t be friends?>> Good question. I mean, you can, and you can be friends without being lovers, but everyone knows that. Everyone expects that from friendship, but why not the other way around? Why wouldn’t you be friends with your lover? Why wouldn’t you be friends with this most-important-criteria-for-selecting-a-long-term-partner-in-the-Western-world, which is <<Do I love them?>> And what is love? Another question people have been asking for millennia (actually just since the birth of Christianity), and no one seems to have an answer….or want an answer. Because questioning love is tantamount to questioning god, and it just goes against the nature of the whole drive of love, which is not to know. That’s really it. Love is about not knowing what love is, not knowing who the partner that is loved is, not knowing who they are.
What is compatibility then?
Compatibility is about knowing who the other person is. Objectively. You are a turtle. Because you are slow, hide in your shell, and seem to be amphibious. Unlike snails for instance, who only meet the first two criteria.
You’re an INFP. Therefore, you float on the seas rudderless and seem to prefer this state of affairs. You are guided only be the oceanic currents of the universal, the whole to which you submit. You call this love.
And so on and so forth. But since when you love something, you can’t know what it is, how can you determine if you are compatible with it…them?
By love?
By how you feel about them? Isn’t that how you got into this whole mess in the first place?
Love is all fine and good, and necessary. Always necessary. Always indispensable. Always what the whole shebang is about for INFJ INFP folks. Because without love, life is tragedy…an even worse tragedy than if you were in love and had your heart smashed on the rocks of hell, because as you hippies will say <<It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all>>. Where you get that from — a fortune cookie?
Yeah, true, there is nothing like love and loss, makes life poignant and disarrayed in proper fashion, but hey, you know what’s even better —-to love and not lose. How about that cookieheart? How about if you could love someone and then not have to stupidly and tragically lose them in the surf of your heart, because you actually learned a few principles about how life works apart from your tender fated mind?
What if, unlike a baleen whale, you didn’t open your mouth and let the whole world come tumbling in through your sweet strainer? Or what if your strainer was intelligent, such that it only let baleen shrimp in?
What if, because you INFJ INFP like to read so much, you could attract a person that read the same books as you, and you weren’t just preoccupied with….maybe you are already doing this, maybe you already know your type, what’s compatible with you, but then you attract a drug addict, a borderline, a narcissist …
Well, my point is you are conditioned to believe that love is loss beneath everything, so you are setting yourself up for failure, which you love, because you are a loser, and can’t bear being successful. Love has nothing to do with power. Love is about poignant sweet tragedy and sadness. Doomed to wither. And you put in your lot with that cheerfully, heroically, like you are doing someone a favor — your sad universe perhaps. With love as your sad god.
And even after all this, I say, yes, it’s all necessary. I know you INFJ INFP cocksuckers. I know that you feel misunderstood when the world tells you to get your head out of the clouds and come down to Earth, to just settle down with some wayfaring stranger that you have no trucks with. Just get on with the business of life. It’s passing you by. What are you doing dwelling in chimera and romantic fantasies?
Well fuck them.
But fuck you. They’re stupid, but so are you. And unfortunately your two forms of stupidness don’t cancel each other out.
These cocksuckers would have you settle down, have the baby, while first finding the man or woman that you can be practical with. You must have a sensible life that will please your parents, society, or some other entity that isn’t going to be in the relationship with you, but has no problem dictating to you about how you should live.
But what those well-meaning assholes are saying is that somewhere in the societal slipknot, you should mesh with your partner and create a productive team-working relationship, in the economics of things. And they aren’t wrong. However they are misguided in dispensing advice to INFP INFJ because they themselves lack a certain drive that drives these two MBTI types crazy —-the search for unconditional romantic love from a soulmate that matches them deep down.
What is this deep down you speak of, says the earth creature? It’s love, I can’t explain…ahh. You can explain what yellow looks like to a blind person either. So, just don’t.
If these well-meaning sensors were wise, they would recognize this stuff isn’t landing with INFJ INFP people, and have the courtesy to wonder why. But it’s too much to expect, as time has proven, so stop casting your pearls before swine. Stop expecting to be heard by the herd, and wisely and intelligently move on.
But then we have those Rationals and I can imagine them undertaking a relationship based on mutual self-interests. They’re smart (some of them). They know what they like, or more accurately, they don’t have this love bug banging up against their walls like some mad tyrant, so they can be rational. It would be interesting to study these people a little bit, for a little point of reflection, before you let your INFJ INFP passions get the better of you. I know it looks lifeless, I know it looks lackluster, but you’re not going to employ their methods in the same way they do.
You are going to have a meeting of the minds. You are going to like the person you are in love with. But there is a bit of a delicate science to it. Because you can’t automatically like a person that you are in love with. Which means that at the outset, before you enter into liaisons with the fair sex, whoever that might be, you have to first perform an analysis when you feel that hot fever dream hit you, when you go over the moon about a person.
Here’s where a little analysis can go a long way, and then once you perform this very perfunctory analysis, you will never have to worry about it again, because indeed you will not run into all the problems that hitherto have plagued you when the love wears off, when reality returns, and now you are face-to-face with an actual person, in a situation where it critically matters who they really are.
Now, when you are in love, you contradictorily cannot, and moreover, you will resist performing this type of analysis, because as I said, love doesn’t want to know who the other person is. That would get in the way of loving them. And love being the absolute tyrant that it is, will rule the day and take our well-meaning INFP INFJ into fields and pastures (and later rocks) that they know not of (unless they have been in love before, in which case, they still don’t care).
Analysis 1: Who is this other person? Objectively
How are we to perform such a feat? We can’t know a person objectively. There is no such thing as objectivity in regards to people. People are incalculable one-off singular entities that in their infinite snowflakeness remain incapable of demystification. Well no, that’s the love thing again. That’s only true (or whatever) from the point of view of the die-hard romantic in love, or just the INFP INFJ point of view of life in general.
But realize there is the whole other world where things are objectively knowable. Maybe not with people, as is commonly admitted, even by Rationals who consider people’s bloody-minded desires as always wrecking their crystal-clear utopian visions. But I, as neither, or a curious cross-blend between the two, think that both are true — people are incalculable and wholly unknowable as souls, yet the opposite is true as well. People are no more complicated than a simple machine, or a complex machine, but I like to make things as simple as possible, so I’ll just say that people are rather simple to understand. And machines operate on basic principles, and these principles are knowable as any rocket scientist will tell you. Otherwise, ain’t nobody going nowhere.
And so as I was alluding to, since compatibility is a quality of the mind in some way, and since the mind deals with things that are knowable, or capable of being understood, we are on good ground here as far as assessing compatibility with this, that, or the other thing — person, place, or veil.
Like, we have John. He’s an INFP. Right there we know something about him. He’s not just a jellyfish floating rudderless on the infinite sea of fate. Even that he is like a jellyfish tells us something objective about John too. The only problem is that when it comes to people, everyone might not agree that the person under consideration, John, in this case, is like a jellyfish. They might think John is rather more like a turtle or a dog or a god or a hog…you name it.
But what if I told you John is a rocket scientist that has been studying at NASA for ten years. He is particularly interested in astral physics, but anyway, this is objective. Is he likely to want to go fishing every weekend while attending to the baby? Maybe. Does he like to fight and fuck? Maybe, but not in the way that people living in the gladiatorial rings all their lives are likely to, not only like, but be good at.
What are you good at?
Ah, what’s that I say? Being good at something. Yes, there is something missing from all this compatibility business, this MBTI typing business. People are always talking about internal preferences, that this is what MBTI measures. Nah, it’s not I say. Because otherwise, it is just like love, and a bunch of other things where we see what we want to see. Love is in the eye of the beholder etc etc. No, this is where the human machine becomes really simple. What can you do at above average, or well above average of the human population you find yourself a member of? That’s what you are compatible with.
And it ain’t necessarily determined by what you love the most. Or maybe it is, but that’s still too wide a gamut to cross, like swallowing the entire world or something, and then realizing what you really love is…well…
You don’t know.
Hahaha.
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