To Myst and Ria:
I'm really sorry that you guys are having a hard time with your ISTPs, although I agree about the value of commitment.
I don't really have quite the same problem with my dear ISTP, although he does wonder sometimes why I'm always so "critical" of things, which I guess, is my J against his P? As far as emotions go, I'm usually the logical one. He seems to have the problem of having a lot of emotions and not really knowing what to do with them, while I seem better at channeling and using emotion...does that make any sense?
I think what you said about you being the logical one w emotions makes sense... I'd be interested if you want to share an example of it and then I might understand better.
My bf says I'm critical too, especially of people. It's funny because to me, he seems more critical and I probably haven't understood what he meant too well.
I think his critical-ness may be expressing his logical ideas (his T) without considering people's feelings too much. I think he doesn't usually realize this can come across as critical. He often says he doesn't mind if people tell him he's wrong (like about a logical computer problem) and he gets surprised when other people get upset if he says they're wrong. He has had some trouble at work with it and so he has told me he tries to be very diplomatic now. I think I have to try to understand that he doesn't mean to be critical sometimes even though what he says would sound critical to other people. Sometimes I think I can do this but sometimes I have a hard time accepting that he doesn't consider people's feelings much.
Times he's said I'm critical recently are when I said I didn't like two different salespeople. I didn't mean this very strongly when I said it. Since they are just salespeople who won't know or care what I say, I didn't think it mattered much. One of the salespeople was in a bike shop and I thought he didn't give me very good help. I'm not very knowledgeable about bikes (though not clueless) and so I tend to expect the salesperson to make some effort to explain what you need to know to pick a bike in a way that I can understand. At some other bike shops the salespeople were better at that. But twice when I had gone into this bike shop the sales people didn't make much effort to explain anything (once the person was watching TV). This bike shop is popular and has a good reputation, so I guess at least someone there is knowledgable, but they weren't big on helpfulness the two times I asked about a bike.
Anyway, my bf is bringing this up as an example of something I do in more important situations. I guess that if I'm thinking about feelings and he's not, it could seem unpredictable when I express negative feelings about my perception of someone else's lack of sensitivity, or something like that. I guess I've been thinking of it as an F T thing. Maybe it's P J too. I've been confused about the difference between F, T and P, J because somewhere I read that F or T are the way people make jugements, as opposed to S or N being the way people take information in. I wonder if F and T are about immediate judements, kind of like understanding basic facts, and P and J are a little more long term jugements. Hmmm, I dunno.
I'm thinking about what you said about your bf having a lot of emotions he doesn't know what to do with. I wonder if my bf has this, but I can't really tell. I try not to assume people have feelings just because I would have feelings in the same situation. But maybe I should try harder to look for his feelings.
He just called me and was in too much of a hurry to get off the phone for me, as usual :sad:
I'm curious how strongly expressed other ISTP's T's or P's are, if you all don't mind me asking? Or how strong the F or J's are for ISTP's partners?
