Part 2 of our Q and A Session with PeopleMaps Psychology Director, Anne Ellis looks at how personality affects relationships, and how it can best be used to help explain them.

Q: How can personality affect relationships?

First off, we have to consider that we have relationships with a whole host of people who may relate to the world in a different way from us - and in the process they will influence their own and our behaviour.

For example, think about how people would behave if they were at a social gathering and someone introduced themselves as a religious minister. Would this cause them to adjust or moderate their behaviour to accommodate a seemingly appropriate relationship with this person? Or would they continue as they would with someone they had met in a pub? The answer is that it would be automatic for most people - those of strong faith and none - to adjust as they believe circumstances required.

So it is worthwhile being aware that these adjustments go on all the time in relationships - in all sorts of ways, and that people are not even aware that they are making them. It is therefore difficult to ascribe fixed characteristics to people - and what profiling does is categorise how they tend to behave most of the time. This is achieved by measuring attitudes and preferences for thinking or feeling and sensing or intuition and it is the combination of these scales that enable people to be characterised within a personality type group.

According to Carl Jung - the Swiss psychologist on whose work the PartnerMaps profiling is based - these categories could by used to identify behaviour that people have in common while he still believed that every single person was unique. Their uniqueness is due to the differences to the application and extent that they use the shared characteristics - and this is the major cause of differences in relationships.

Q: Can personality be used to identify romantic partners?

It is often said that opposites attract - and this can be the case. If someone was particularly quiet and self effacing they may initially be attracted to the behaviour of someone who, to them, seemed confident and self assured - mainly because they were louder and more able to voice their opinions. The chances are that before very long this attraction would lessen, as they could not cope with such loud behaviour on an ongoing basis - and the same would be true of the reverse situation.

Marriage guidance counsellors often refer to a common statement made by people in a breaking relationship, when they ask, “What attracted you to John in the first place?”. Mary may answer “He was such good fun”. When the counsellor then asks, “Is he no longer fun then?”, Mary responds, “No, it ’s not that, it is just that he infuriates me by never taking anything seriously!”.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung

This is a case of the opposites being attracted to each other for the wrong reasons. The things that really hold a relationship together were absent and these two gradually irritated each other. In this case Mary is probably a more sober, cautious person who really values taking life and responsibilities seriously. John on the other hand, wants to treat life lightly and have a laugh. He now views her as boring, and she sees him as irresponsible.

For a relationship to work people need to share similar goals and values and without this, no matter what personality mix the relationship will flounder. There needs to be respect for each other in a relationship - and when there is, even if people have very different views or methods of achieving their goals, they will still support each other. If however there is no respect for each partner’s values, then very soon there will be no respect for the person either.

Q: How then to use personality to help relationships?

You can get the best out of a relationship through an understanding of personality type. It is obvious in the above scenario that two very different types were initially attracted. Provided that their goals and values were in sync this could have worked very well. A quieter person often depends on a noisier person to keep a conversation going - or the noisier person relies on the quieter one to bring some calm to their lives.

John the extravert and Mary the introvert were in a relationship that worked for some of the time, however there is much more at play in relationships than the bi-polar scale of extraversion and introversion. With most couples this is a common combination, but did John and Mary also differ in the scale that measures Thinking/Feeling? Many couples do - and it also works well.

However, if John irritated Mary by not taking things seriously and he also had a preference for Feeling versus her preference for Thinking then this combination is beginning to get difficult - bearing in mind that they may not have started out with any shared goals or values to glue things together.

If Mary’s preference was for Thinking, then she her focus would be on the task, it’s objective and her aim to get things done. John, we know, likes to enjoy life and have a laugh and if this is now combined with a preference for Feeling he will be guided more by his emotions - relating warmly to people rather than being objective and focused on completing the task.

“It’s better that people get along well together and can have a laugh, lighten up and enjoy life, than be an old misery to others” may be John’s take on things, in opposition to Mary’s need for action that will produce positive results. So now there is a mismatch on two of the bi-polar scales - which is common enough for many couples and does not in itself necessarily lead to a dysfunctional relationship. However, if we add the third bi-polar scale of Sensing and Intuition and find that there is a mismatch here too, the trouble could be deepening for John and Mary.

Let’s add Sensing to Mary’s introverted Thinking preferences and Intuition to John’s Extraverted Feeling preferences, and now we really do have a pair of opposite personality types. The combination that possibly causes more relationship breakdowns than any other is Sensing - V - Intuition. With Sensing, we have someone who interprets information through their senses: “If I can feel it, smell it, see it, I may believe it”. They need concrete proof of something that it is real. Whereas those with a preference for Intuition are more free spirited and believe in potential, and for some of them that potential could be enormous - but it never seems to get any closer.

If we assume that John has a preference for Intuition and pitch this against Mary’s pragmatic, down to earth take on life they will really now be getting on each other’s nerves: Mary wants logic, certainty, future planning and an affordable life. John wants fun, friendships and just knows that if only one of his big intuitive ideas in which only he sees the potential comes to fruition life will be great!

It looks like the game is probably up for Mary and John, yet there are many relationships where the partners are as different as these two - and it works. Go back to first principles. It works because there is more glue in their shared goals and values than in their mismatched personalities, and when this is the case it can work very well.

Part 3 reveals how to choose the ideal partner …