Abstracting Feeling
Intuitive feelers turn every feeling into an abstraction. All idealism involves emotional abstraction to get to the purified ideal, or thing-in-itself, like love or hate, but now cut-off from the environment or outer world where it originated. Maybe it originated in another world, like a Platonic ideal.
As far as love and relationships are concerned, this emotional abstracting capacity leads to the concept of love without conditions —unconditional love.
At bottom, an INFJ needs something related to FEELING in a relationship with a significant other.
The INFJ man is likely to employ all manner of ruses that prevent his would-be suitors from seeing this need because this is a most precious and sensitive area for him. He may not even know himself how much he desires this type of connection with a woman.
Fi id
The reason he is likely not to know that he desires this type of connection with a woman is because the id function represents everything that is subconscious in an MBTI type. Introverted feeling is particularly subconscious as a cognitive function because it is feeling and it is internal. Nobody may suspect its existence, even under normal conditions, but in the INFJ man, it may be buried so deep down within the ensconces of childhood that it might as well be a fiction.
When he grows up, undergoes puberty, and puts away the things of childhood, there is still this Fi id function underlying everything he does in life as a root motive. This is also where things are likely to get really fucked up, complicated, and confusing.
Or if he is wounded emotionally, which is fairly likely to be the case, as it is nearly inevitable that there will be some emotional damage stemming from this function somewhere in the early mothering experience, and if not that, then from his peers, or something else…because basically he feels too much, he is too concerned with feeling, and this will generally not work well in this world no matter what his early circumstances. It is the Fi id function that is the stuff of depth psychology, why it exists in the first place — INFJs are a psychological goldmine of feeling waiting to come up to the surface and be purged.
It is also the double-edged sword of why they either make great relationship partners or the most fucked up person you could imagine being in a relationship with, and perhaps, both at the same time.
They are childlike and unadulterated in their emotions, simply because that’s the nature of the id. It’s like a wild horse, or an infant, and infants have big needs at this level. When they’re hungry for milk and they’re not getting fed, they will scream bloody murder. It’s completely irrational.
As the INFJ male grows older he learns to fantasize and imagine with this same strong feeling and intuition. He imagines things as they could be and finds much that is either painful or not good enough for some reason. It’s like he’s from another world. He will find himself in a hostile environment that is not set up for people like him. He will either learn to protect himself or perish.
But this feeling side of himself never goes away, and later when he is looking for a partner he will subconsciously want someone who can meet him here.
If this criteria is not met, it is hardly likely that any further qualifications could produce a successful relationship, which, however doesn’t mean just because this one is met, that it will. This is simply what an INFJ man most needs in a relationship, per the title of this article.
My tone here cannot help but be solemn and grave. It’s something he wants so badly, yet often does not know how to name, or express, and it even goes so far as to be something that subconsciously sabotages him in relationships that are otherwise worthwhile, because he cannot get this thing he needs so badly.
It is this very thing that can cause him to drive away a woman whom he loves too much, a woman who has touched him in this most naked and vulnerable place, and if he is wounded, he will destroy out of this impulse of love.
Hell hath no fury like an infant scorned. Because his needs are so big here, it is hardly likely that they could have been met, maybe impossible, like an ideal can be impossible or unattainable. It’s no one’s fault really, just a fact of his nature meeting the facts of nature proper —the world.
Because he’s intuitive he cannot accept facts like a sensor feeling type can. The INFJ man comes into this world with the faculty to imagine the way things could be, or could have been. It’s a propensity to abstract a feeling away from its original context and imagine it in another, or in a state of perfection.
What he needs in a woman
He needs a woman that can feel. Delicate situation. He needs a woman that can enter him without force such that it happens as a fact of her emotional nature. It’s like sex in the astral. She’s already in. No muss, no fuss.
Once she is there, she should tread very tenderly because there is no way of telling what fucked up shit is lingering around, and the INFJ man is likely to be helpless to it. He is a child here. Gentleness is needed no matter what.
There will be understanding without words or explanation. This can’t be faked.
All this the INFJ man needs but is likely not to give the slightest hint that he does, which in the first place is because he doesn’t know. Maybe at some point he did, but then became jaded and decided on other qualities being more important. Nonetheless, even if he has an inkling of an idea, he is likely to declare the opposite. This is a part of his adult strategy. He can almost make it a point of <<I dare you to go there>>, but without any explicit statements in this regard, only subtext and insinuation.
However, lying in the adult INFJ man is this precious thing that is almost a fiction.
The second thing an INFJ man needs in a relationship is understanding. Without this, love by itself, though necessary, is very dangerous. Next time I shall delve deeper into this.
Meanwhile, what do you think an INFJ man needs in a relationship: sex, love, deep-dish pizza? What?
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