Looked at the profiles again.

I saved a list of some of the people who I looked at the other day who I thought might possibly be IEEs. I looked at their profiles again. Sometimes if you look at them more than once, you get used to them.

I can recognize ILEs now (my semi-dual relationship). Eric was an ILE. There's a characteristic facial expression they make when they have their picture taken - it's a silly, open-mouthed face, or sticking the tongue out, or any kind of clownish face at all - and actually, that used to annoy me. So I know that I probably shouldn't try to be with people who are making that face. It's almost always associated with guys who describe themselves as nonconformist intellectuals, and they do, and say, strange intellectual things, the style of which I recognize. Eric used to stick his tongue out at me EVERY SINGLE TIME I TOOK HIS PICTURE, with almost no exceptions. He would make a clown face or a rude face almost every time. I simply could not get a simple straight-faced picture from him ever. So I recognize that expression as the 'semi-dual' expression.

So I looked at people who were OBVIOUSLY 'feelers' instead of thinkers. But I'm having a hard time recognizing the right ones. I can figure out when they're probably intuitive-ethicals, but I'm never quite sure WHICH ONE they are.

I'm strongly, intensely repulsed by guys who like team sports, but I don't mind individual sports as much... although I still feel grudging and reluctant if they place any importance on sports at all. If someone liked skiing or something like that, something a person does alone, or dancing, ice skating, skateboarding, that kind of thing, I don't mind it as much, especially since I myself have gone skiing and loved it, and I also used to run track. It's just that I loathe people watching team sports on television, and if they place a lot of importance on watching television at all, I don't relate to them.

I'm looking for people who I can tolerate well enough that I won't mind severely lowering my standards in order to be with them. If someone is tolerable enough, I might be able to endure being with them even if I have to break a large number of rules of what I actually want in a relationship. 'Lowering my standards' is probably going to be the key to my having a real world relationship. I am going to have to tolerate being incompatible with someone in about 80% of the things that matter most to me, because the people who agree with me about everything are extremely rare and they are always 1. already taken, and 2. monogamous.

I wish that I could learn to recognize which one of the four NFs someone is by reading their profiles. I'd rather not email them and interact with them until the very last minute after I've mostly decided that I might be able to endure them. Online dating is EXTREMELY PAINFUL and almost unbearable because I've had so many email conversations that eventually had to end. I don't like starting an email conversation with someone and then ending it. I feel horribly guilty if I'm the one who initiated the conversation and then decided later on to abandon it because I could feel that something wasn't right.

Not only that, but in the past, 'they' often forced me to initiate a conversation with this or that particular guy, and 'they' were telling me to do things like go after very young guys. There is some benefit to going after very young guys, because I might possibly find a really good one who, out of sheer luck, hasn't fallen in love yet. But still, that wasn't the strategy I myself would have chosen - it was something 'they' forced me to try.

I'm actually grateful to read about socionics' intertype relations because now at least I have an idea what to look for. I thought my old best friend Rachael (ENFP) was just some kind of a fluke, and I thought I probably shouldn't try to marry an ENFP. But we were best friends for eleven years until she met her husband. That was why I was so impressed with socionics because it said that no, actually, Rachael was my dual, and that's probably the best relationship I can hope for. But it's not easy to find male Rachaels.

Again, I can look at them, I can KIND OF see them, but I have to reluctantly, painfully, grudgingly lower my standards A LOT, and I don't mean in terms of physical appearance - I've seen enough people who were pleasant enough to look at (except for having short hair, but I already know that my wish for long hair will be impossible to get, and if I am looking for an IEE with long hair, that will be an extremely rare person, or someone from a totally different culture - I guess I could look for Sikhs, except that I don't want to be with anyone who's religious). No, I just mean I have to lower my standards as to their intelligence, mostly, and their awareness of the issues and things that interest me. I don't want to use the enneagram at all, but I'm aware that there might be 'Nine-like' guys who are ignorant about almost everything that matters to me, and they are going to have a 'happy rainbows' kind of attitude, and I might have to tolerate that. In some ways that might be better, because I can be the one who has all the opinions about the dark, miserable, scary things in the world, and they, on the other hand, will have no opinions about anything at all - so we won't disagree. I'll just be the one who HAS THE OPINIONS. They'll be the blank slate.

I don't feel guilty if the guy initiated it as much, but I DO feel guilty for abandoning a conversation if the person was attracted to my profile because of specific, unique, or rare things about me. That's why my profile is hidden right now, so that no guys will initiate at all. There was one guy who I talked to once who was interested in the weirdest, most unusual, most extreme things about me, and yet I abandoned that particular conversation because something wasn't flowing properly - we actually talked on the phone once, maybe twice. I felt really guilty about cutting off that relationship.

I'm trying to understand HOW, by what process, Rick arrived at his beliefs. His beliefs happen to agree with almost all of mine, and even when I disagree about something, I still agree with most of it or with the conclusions he draws from it (peak oil for instance).

I wish I had something better to use than the enneagram to explain the 'non-socionic factors' that make one IEE different from another. The enneagram is a total clusterfuck. I sometimes sort of use it to give me a general idea of someone, but I can't do anything more than just a very general approach with it - it's nowhere near as specific as socionics, and if you try to use the specifics, as they are described in the books, it turns into a mess. I struggled with the enneagram for years and I am disgusted with it.