Hi there, love the insight your blog brings. I have multiple questions, feel free to answer any combo of them, or any individual one... whatever you have time for. - Perspective on an INFP/INTP relationship - Perspective on an ENTP/INTP friendship - What a thriving vs non thriving INTP looks like Thanks!
Hi there, I am glad you say so, so thank you! :)
INFP x INTP relationship: a great relationship to feel relatively well understood by each other in terms of sharing preference for introspection, individualism, and taking life as it comes, all while complimenting each other in judging preferences. For example, INFP might help INTP with understanding emotional motivations, and INTP can help an INFP with seeing the world from a more universal and factual standpoint. The struggle could be that both of you can slip into a rut with little desire or motivation to leave it. When you’ve got two introverts together, they might enable each other to avoid developing their extroverted functions.
ENTP x INTP friendship: I believe I’ve covered it on my blog, so you can search the tags. Great friendship dynamic, overall, as ENTP keeps feeding INTP ideas that INTP gladly deconstructs.
(In all honesty, I can’t give you very much on friendships and relationships because my focus is always on the individual.)
Thriving vs not thriving INTP (if you’re using this instead of “unhealthy”, bless you, haha)... Well, we might begin by looking at Ti.
Like other TPs, they can intellectualise to the point of struggling to grasp the meaning of emotional motivations people have; they can become nihilistic because they assume all answers can be found by objective logic alone, which excludes half of the reality (the feeling world), therefore producing a sense of emptiness; they may take an excessively critical and destructive attitude to things, which leads to self-imposed isolation and unhappiness, when instead they could use their skills and knowledge to contribute/build things (being constructive).
Good Ti understands the limits of where and how it should be used. After all, all of us use 4 functions, so why assume that one function should cover all the ground?
But for INTPs specifically, I can see them simply getting too comfortable with their own routine and then slipping into a rut by failing to exercise their auxiliary Ne, or simply using it to indulge in fruitless fantasy that only leaves them feeling more empty in the end.
Good Ne use is about bringing great ideas into fruition, but it can’t be done if an INTP is using Ti to logically explain why all action is useless, and then back it up with cherry picked Si experience. It’s just comfort seeking behaviour, which is essentially the same as resisting the development of auxiliary function.
As such, if an INTP wants to stop feeling like they are in a rut, they need to open up to the idea that the way they have built up the world to be (in their minds) might be incorrect... as clearly their emotional state indicates. In short, to thrive, an INTP should focus on personal progress instead of using all their mental energy to deconstruct things. It’s a matter of adding to the world vs subtracting from it. Only one of them leads to positivity in all senses of the word.