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INTJs in Love<br />

Problems with Studying Type and Love<br />

So, what are the connections between type, attraction, love and marriage? Actually, they haven't<br />

been well studied yet. The question is more complicated than you'd think.<br />

Partner selection (the biggy) actually has fairly few correlations with type. The studies that do exist<br />

are too small for the purpose of studying INTJs. The problem is this: to answer with certainty the<br />

question of whether or not certain types are attracted to certain other types, we would need to<br />

sample at least 136 potential pairings. And this would merely give us one example of each type<br />

matched with every other possible type. But if you wanted actual results, you would need to have<br />

several dozen times times this number of pairings. Big studies get expensive.<br />

Furthermore, that still doesn't answer the question of whether initial attraction implies marital<br />

satisfaction, or how to interpret the results. For example, suppose that you simply wanted to see if<br />

people are drawn to those with more or less similar personality types. To do this, you might try<br />

comparing the amount of letters that each of the partners have in common. So then if you had an<br />

ENTJ-ENFJ pairing with high attraction, you would say, "Aha, three letters in common!<br />

Similarities attract!" But in fact, ENTJs and ENFJs are as different as night and day. If anything,<br />

this is proof that opposites attract. The other way to measure satisfaction is to compare completely<br />

opposite types, i.e. are INTJs more attracted to INTJs or to ESFPs?<br />

Ah, but how does one measure satisfaction? Each type has different satisfiers; the gesture of love<br />

that one type finds deeply meaningful may be shrugged off by another type as dull or frivolous.<br />

Some types have high needs in certain areas and low needs in others; is it possible to define<br />

"satisfaction" in a way that equally represents the opinions of everyone? Finally, how do we deal<br />

with the problem of the type whose perfect match is the rare INFJ, a personality which is hard to<br />

find, let alone marry? Even if type A is madly attracted to type B and they would be absolutely<br />

perfect together, it doesn't do any good if type B is rare and unavailable. So perhaps type A will<br />

marry another, more common type (type C) in droves. Thus the study would "prove" that type A<br />

and type C are highly compatible, when in fact type A is actually more compatible with type B.<br />

Has any study accounted for these all problems? Nope.

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