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Noah -> RE: Is the personality type you search for really what you want? (6/8/2007 4:54:35 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mistoferin
There is a Dominant I know who has had a series of failed relationships. He is a bit of a white knight and is always choosing submissives who struggle in life and are very dependent. The problem comes in though when they try to form a partnership. Their lack of ability to be autonomous drives him crazy after a while. The very things he says he wants in a partner, and the things that initially attract him to those people....end up being the things that he has the biggest issues with in the long term.
I, myself, have had the opposite problem. I have met men who say they want someone who is strong, capable and self reliant....only to later have them tell me that I am not needy or dependent enough.
Many of us take a lot of time to reflect on what personality traits in a partner will best meet our needs and compliment us. Do you find that your pre conceived ideas of what you want are in sync with what works best for you in reality, or do certain personalities initially attract you but then don't prove to really be a good "fit"?
I have never searched for a personality type. It seems like a pretty weak way to go about things.
I try to open myself to who and what the world presents, and to try to make some music where the resonation is most compelling, you might say.
It may be brief or enduring, deep or shallow, broad or narrow. I wonder if my habit of seeing people as uniquely inspirited individuals rather than asinstances of psychological "types" has helped me avoid the syndrome described over and over here, that of serial, similar, crap relationships?
To my way of seeing, encountering another person as "an alpha male" or as "an A type" or as "a natural submissive" is pretty close to encountering them as a nigger or a kyke or a fag or a piece of ass. The sin in each case is to consider a person an object, first--a means rather than an end, to put it in Kantian terms. To me it is the same sort of sin whether the theoretical object which stands in our mind for the person in front of us it is an object of racial prejudice or an object of quasi-scientific analysis.
Though while of the same type of course these sins can vary in severity.
I don't know how one loves a type, for one thing, and I suspect that how one loves a type is .... not so well. And that the "type" you choose to engage with (seen--as shown by your language--as being prior to the person who represents the type) doesn't do an entirely great job of loving you back, well, that doesn't surprise me. I doubt "types" can love any better than they can be loved.
I wonder what would happen if, just as an experiment, you were to spend a year refraining utterly from classifying people in your psychological taxonomy, instead to just encounter them as they are without any theoretical constructs lying like bundling boards athwart your attempts at intimacy with them.
To never ever say "you just did something passive-aggressive" or "you just displayed control/abandonment/etc/etc issues" but rather to say: "Hey, you just did <this>" ... to encounter it as what it is rather than for what some theory classsifies it as, and to encounter them as people rather than instances of types.
I suspect that many people encounter me as a type. They check off some box or boxes early on and figure thay have me sussed.
Often enough I don't much care and occaisionally I'm able to use their preconceptions as levers. Sometimes I suppose it irks me. Sometimes it might sadden me, other times amuse me.
I mean maybe they do have me sussed. I don't know.
What I do know is that the people who have become friends of decades standing, or lovers, or heroes of mine have tended to be people who did not handle other people with the oven mitts of theory but who were able instead to be in the moment, grasping bare-handed and open-heartedly the being who stood before them in all their flawed glory.
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