Type
- ENFJ women in relationships — the Protagonist, function order Fe–Ni–Se–Ti. The feeling and the handling of the feeling arrive as one operation, at speed. There is no interior version sitting behind the delivered one, waiting, more honest.
Commonly read as
- Women get called fake. True, general, and it does not explain the correlation — the less able version of her was believed completely, by the same people, for years.
What is actually running
- Warmth in a woman is expected to be involuntary, so when it turns out to be skilled the skill has nowhere to go except into the sincerity column as a subtraction. Her sincerity, as scored by the only model anybody is using, decays at the same rate as her ability improves.
What it costs
- Nothing she owns can demonstrate feeling rather than competence, because everything she has done about anybody has been done well. A man married to somebody clumsy at love has better evidence about being loved than a man married to somebody excellent at it. Clumsiness is information; competence is not.
What the same act earns him
- A man’s warmth is not expected in the first place, so competence reads as a bonus rather than as a contamination. The same machinery costs him a completely different bill, and it is not this one.
Warmth in a woman is supposed to be involuntary, so evidence of skill is evidence against feeling: every observation of the craft subtracts from the sincerity, and craft accumulates with practice. She has been getting better at the only thing she is for since she was nineteen — and her improvement is the only thing producing the doubt.
Her closest friend of thirty-one years said it at a kitchen table in the spring, about four minutes after she had defused something between two other people at that table without either of them noticing.
She said: you’re so good at this. Sometimes I can’t tell if you actually like any of us.
Everybody laughed, including her. It was a joke, it was said with love, and her friend meant about eight per cent of it and would be genuinely distressed to know that the eight per cent had been detected.
She has thought about it for two years.
Not because it hurt, though it did for about a day. Because it is unanswerable, and she worked that out on the drive home and has not found a way round it since.
Anything she could produce in her own defence — the years, the specific occasions, the four people who would say she saved something — arrives as a further exhibit of the same skill. There is no item in her possession that demonstrates feeling rather than competence, because everything she has ever done about anybody has been done well.
What she did, in the car, was try to think of one thing she had done for that woman in thirty-one years that had not been done well. She got as far as a lift to an airport in 2004 which had been genuinely inconvenient and which she had made no attempt to conceal was inconvenient, and then realised that she was now assembling a defence and that assembling defences is also a skill.
The only thing that would have answered her friend is her having been bad at it.
She is fifty-two and she has been getting better since she was nineteen.
There is one more thing about that kitchen and it is the part she has never managed to set aside. Her friend was right to wonder. Not right that the answer is no — the answer is not no, and thirty-one years of evidence would say so if evidence worked here. Right that there is no way for her to find out, and that a person standing next to somebody this capable for three decades has been taking a great deal on faith without ever being offered a reason to.
How ENFJ Women Approach Relationships
Start with the folk model, because it is doing all the work and nobody in that kitchen holds it consciously.
Sincerity, in the ordinary account, is guaranteed by spontaneity. What is genuinely felt comes out unbidden; what is planned has been decided on; and a thing that has been decided on is, by the same account, not quite a thing that was felt. Nobody would defend that model if it were written down. Everybody runs it.
The ENFJ profile settles what this instrument is and what it can do. Everything the folk model then does with it turns on a second default, which is that warmth in a woman is supposed to be involuntary. It is understood as a property of her nature rather than as an accomplishment, so when it turns out to be skilled, the skill has nowhere to go except into the sincerity column, as a subtraction. A man’s warmth is not expected in the first place. When he has it, competence reads as a bonus rather than as a contamination, and what the same machinery costs him is a completely different bill.
Put those two together and the arithmetic runs one way only.
Every observation of her craft is evidence against her feeling. Craft accumulates with practice. Therefore her sincerity, as scored by the only model anybody is using, decays at the same rate as her ability improves.
She was believed absolutely at twenty-four. She was worse at it then. Clumsier, slower, wrong about the timing perhaps a third of the time, and nobody who knew her in that period has ever once doubted her, including the ones who doubt her now.
Two consequences, and the second is where the marriage lives.
The accusation gets warmer rather than harsher as she ages. Nobody is going to call her calculating; what she gets instead is she’s such a diplomat, or she always knows the right thing to say, or you’re so good at this: all of it fond, at gatherings, from people who love her. It is the identical claim wearing a coat, and the coat is what makes it impossible to answer, because there is nothing to object to and objecting would itself be a piece of well-judged handling.
And her husband cannot tell either. He does not think she is insincere; that is not what is happening. He has no test available, because every single thing she does for him is done well, and done-well is precisely the property that would be present in both the true version and the false one. Twenty-six years of impeccably judged love, and not one item in it that could only have come from somebody who meant it.
A man married to somebody clumsy at love has better evidence about being loved than a man married to somebody excellent at it. Clumsiness is information. Competence is not.
The standard reading fails twice. Women get called fake is true and general and does not explain the correlation, which is with skill and not with anything else — the less able version of her was believed completely, by the same people, for years. And it cannot explain who says it. This is not coming from people who dislike her. It is her sister, her closest friend of three decades, and her husband once, in 2014, in the middle of an argument about something else. It is not that people doubt her. It is that her own improvement is the only thing producing the doubt.
Dating an ENFJ Woman: The Early Stage
In their fourth month she did something badly.
His father was ill and she said the wrong thing about it — got the register wrong, said something about her own grandfather that was not relevant, went on slightly too long, then stopped mid-sentence and said she was making a mess of this.
He still refers to it. Twenty-six years on, at tables, when the subject comes up: she was the only person who tried.
She has never told him that she has spent a great deal of the intervening time trying to work out how to do that again.
Because it worked, and she knows exactly why it worked, and knowing why is the reason it cannot be repeated. The clumsiness transmitted something the polished version does not: that there was a person behind it who had not planned it. She was twenty-five and had not yet acquired the equipment, and the absence of the equipment was the message.
Two things follow and both are hers.
She has, from about her mid-thirties, been able to see in advance which of two versions of a thing will land better, and it is often the worse one — and she has therefore been in the position, several hundred times, of choosing between doing something well and doing something that will be believed. Nobody else in her life has ever faced that choice, because nobody else has both options available.
And she cannot manufacture the clumsy version. She has tried. A deliberately awkward sentence is a constructed object, and she can hear the construction in it while it is leaving her mouth, and so, at some level, can everybody in the room — which produces the worst of both, a piece of craft pretending not to be one. The clumsy version was only ever available while she was actually clumsy. That window closed somewhere around 2003.
There is a share here belonging to her, reached about eight years ago and told to nobody.
She has known since her thirties which version will land, and she has not always chosen the one that lands. There are occasions — she can name four — where she did the polished thing on purpose, in full knowledge that the rougher version would have reached the person better, because the polished one was easier and because she was tired and because doing it well is genuinely pleasant. Nobody was harmed. All four were fine.
But a woman who possesses the choice and takes the comfortable option four times is not simply the victim of a folk model. She is also, on those four occasions, somebody who bought her own convenience with somebody else’s reception, and she knows the difference from inside, and nothing set out anywhere above takes that off her.
There is a third thing and it belongs to him and he has no idea about any of it. He thinks the story he tells at tables is a story about her kindness. It is a story about the last time he had proof.
How ENFJ Women Show Love
There are about six things she now does worse than she could, and she has never told anybody that they are deliberate.
The birthday card. She writes it badly on purpose — starts a sentence twice, crosses something out, leaves it a bit lopsided at the bottom. A beautifully composed birthday card from her reads as a beautifully composed birthday card. A messy one reads as her.
The apology, which is the important one. A well-made apology is not received as an apology; it is received as a well-made apology, which is a different object and which the person on the other end can feel being handed to them. So she does hers badly on purpose: out of order, going back over something, with a bit in the middle that does not quite work. That is the only version that has ever ended anything.
The thing she says at his mother’s every Christmas, which is slightly wrong and has been slightly wrong for eleven years.
Two others, smaller. And one she will not describe.
She has been degrading her own work for about fifteen years in order to make it legible, and it started without a decision — she noticed which versions landed, and adjusted, the way she adjusts to everything.
That is what her love looks like in that house, and it is not the arrangements, which are constant, and it is not the noticing, which is total. It is an expensive and continuous act of making herself worse at the one thing she is good at, so that the people she loves can receive any of it.
What the six have bought is worth stating before the cost is, because from the outside they look like nothing at all.
Her mother-in-law, who is not an easy woman and who disliked her openly until about 2007, now defends her to other people. Two of the four apologies that ended real things in this family were hers and both were badly delivered on purpose. Her son, who is not demonstrative and never has been, kept a note she wrote him at nineteen in which she got a name wrong and did not correct it.
None of that would have happened at her natural standard. All of it happened because she went below it, deliberately, and nobody has ever known.
Underneath sit two more, and only one of them has ever had her attention directly.
One of them she has looked at squarely: it works. The card is on a shelf. The apologies end things. Eleven years of a slightly wrong sentence has produced a mother-in-law who says, to other people, that her son married somebody who is not smooth.
The one she has not is that this is, in the plainest terms, a deception carried out for good reasons on people who love her — and that she could not now stop it without every one of those six things suddenly improving, which would be noticed, and which would be worse. The same conversion runs at work, where the woman who handles the difficult client is never given anything difficult of her own, and ENFJ women’s careers takes it up there.
ENFJ Women in Conflict
He said it in 2014, in the middle of an argument about a holiday, and it was not the thing they were arguing about.
He said: I never know when you’re being you.
He apologised for it inside about ninety seconds and meant the apology. She said it was fine, which she also meant, and they went back to the holiday, and it has never been mentioned again in twelve years.
She has thought about it approximately as often as she has thought about anything.
Not because it was unfair. Because she thinks it is a reasonable question and she cannot answer it.
The question depends on a distinction between what she feels and what she does about it, and that distinction does not exist inside her in the way it exists inside most people. No interior version sits behind the delivered one, waiting, more honest. The feeling and the handling of the feeling arrive as one operation, at speed, and always have, and she cannot report on a boundary that is not there.
Which means the true answer to his question is there is no version of me that isn’t doing this, and that sentence, said aloud in a kitchen in 2014, would have been the worst thing either of them had ever heard. It sounds like a confession. It is a description of an architecture.
So she said nothing accurate, and what she said instead was well judged and defused it, and defusing it was another instance of the thing he was asking about.
There was one moment, about twenty minutes after the apology, when she nearly told him.
They were doing something ordinary in the kitchen and she had the sentence available — the true one, about there being no version of her that is not doing this — and she got as far as opening her mouth.
What stopped her was not fear of how it would sound, though it would have sounded terrible. It was that she could already see the shape of what would follow: his face, then his reassurance, then the two or three days of him being slightly careful with her, and then the question quietly reopening about six months later with more material in it than before.
She did the arithmetic in under two seconds, which is what she does, and said something about the recycling.
The gendered layer over that argument runs one way. A man saying he is never off duty is describing a burden, and it is received as one, and somebody offers to take something off him. A woman saying the same thing is understood to be saying that her warmth is produced rather than felt, and there is nowhere for that to go — the sentence is heard as an admission rather than as a report, and the person who hears it cannot un-hear it, and she has known that since long before 2014.
They are fine. They have been fine throughout. He would say, sincerely, that he has never doubted her, and about ninety-two per cent of the time that is exactly true.
What ENFJ Women Need in a Relationship
One person who stops running the test.
That is the whole of the first item and it has to be stated as a policy rather than felt as a mood. Somewhere in the last twenty-six years her husband began doing what everybody around her does, which is to notice how well a thing was done and then, very quietly and without any malice at all, to wonder. He does not experience it as suspicion. He experiences it as observation, four or five times a year, on the warmest occasions.
The test cannot return a result. There is no answer available in either direction, because the property being examined — that a thing was skilfully done — is present whether or not it was meant. Running an unanswerable test on somebody for twenty-six years does not produce doubt exactly; it produces a small permanent reservation attached to every good thing that happens, which is not the same as distrust and is arguably worse, and which she can detect and has never mentioned.
She needs to be told to stop doing things badly.
The six things cost her more than anybody knows and she has been at it for fifteen years, and the cost is not the effort. It is that a woman doing a deliberately clumsy version of her own love is lying, for good reasons, to the people she is loving, and she knows that is what it is even though she would never use the word. Somebody has to say: do it properly and I will believe you anyway. Which cannot be said as a compliment. It has to be an instruction, and then held, because the first well-made apology after fifteen years of rough ones will land oddly and both of them will notice.
And she needs to be given something badly made.
This is the strangest item here and it is the one that would matter most. She cannot receive a well-constructed gift, in any form, from anybody, because she can see the construction — the components, the sequencing, the moment it was decided on — and by the time it arrives she has assembled it in her head and there is nothing left to be given. A clumsy one is opaque to her. It is the only kind she cannot take apart, therefore the only kind she can be surprised by, and nobody has ever worked this out and given her one on purpose.
He built something in 2018 and she watched him build it.
It was a real thing and an unusual one for him: three weeks of arranging, two people brought in on it, a booking made and moved and made again, and a fair amount of expense he did not mention. He was doing it because she had had a bad autumn and he wanted to do something that was not the ordinary thing.
She saw the first component on about day four. She saw the second the same week and after that she could not stop; each new piece slotted into a shape she had already worked out, and by the middle of the second week she knew what it was, when it would be, and roughly what he had spent.
She did not spoil it. She has never spoiled anything.
But by the day itself there was nothing to receive, because receiving requires not having already had it, and she had had it, in instalments, over three weeks, as an assembly problem she solved involuntarily and could not put down.
She thanked him beautifully.
That sentence is the whole of it. She thanked him beautifully, and he was pleased, and it was the best-executed thing she did that month, and it was the only available response, and it is precisely what somebody who had not meant a word of it would have produced.
One woman in that circle has been believed absolutely, by everybody, all her life.
Same instrument — she sees what people need with the same accuracy, at the same speed, and she is wrong about it no more often than anybody described above.
She is terrible at delivering it.
Wrong moment, wrong words, too much, twice interrupting somebody to do it. She has made three people cry by accident in the last decade while trying to help them, and one of those was at a funeral.
Nobody has ever doubted her. Not once, in sixty-one years, by anybody. Her clumsiness is her credential, and it is unforgeable, and it costs her nothing to maintain because it is not maintained.
She is not, in any sense either woman would accept, the happier of the two. She has spent sixty-one years being told she is lovely by people whose situations she was unable to improve, and it is not clear that being believed about a thing you cannot do is worth much.
She is also markedly less effective, and knows it precisely. The things she attempts fail perhaps a third of the time. People are moved by her and are not always helped by her, and she can tell the difference and has been able to since her thirties.
The two of them have known each other since 1994. Each envies the other. Neither has ever said so, and each has, separately and without knowing it about the other, described the trade to somebody else in almost the same words: that you can be believed or you can be effective, and there is no arrangement available that supplies both.
What Partners Should Understand
Say out loud that you are not going to keep asking.
The question of whether the well-made thing was meant has no answer and you have been running it four or five times a year since about 1999, mostly without noticing, always on the warmest occasions. It has not made you distrustful; it has attached a small permanent reservation to every good thing that has happened in your marriage, and she can feel it, and she has never once mentioned it because mentioning it would be another piece of skilled handling.
Retiring it is something you decide rather than something you conclude. Flat voice, ordinary evening, once. I’ve stopped wondering whether you mean it. Do not repeat it and do not explain it, because both convert a closed matter back into an open one.
Second, tell her to do things properly.
She has spent fifteen years making her own work worse so that it would reach you, and the arrangement is expensive and slightly dishonest and she knows both of those. Tell her, specifically, using the birthday card: you don’t have to do that any more. Then let the next one be beautiful and do not make a joke about it, which you will want to do, because the joke would tell her the fifteen years had been correct.
Third — and nobody arrives at this one unaided — make her something badly.
Not a gesture done clumsily on purpose, which she will see through in about four seconds and which would be humiliating for both of you. Something genuinely outside your competence: a thing you are actually bad at, attempted properly and produced badly, with the failure visible in it. That is the single object she cannot disassemble, because there is no construction to detect, and it is therefore the only thing anybody could hand her that she would experience as a surprise. She is fifty-two. Nobody has done it.
The version where the machinery is being used rather than lived inside belongs here, because nothing about the mechanism distinguishes them.
Being extremely good at warmth is also being extremely good at obtaining outcomes from people. A woman whose every kindness works is not distinguishable, by any test available to anybody, from a woman whose every kindness is aimed — and the fact that the distinction cannot be drawn does not mean it does not exist. A husband who cannot tell is not being suspicious. He has been handed no instrument. Neither has anybody else, and that is a real situation rather than an unkindness. The four letters can name a machine that produces this problem. Which household is which, they are not equipped to say.
Her friend will say it again at some point, warmly, at some table, four minutes after she has done something skilful for somebody else.
She will laugh, and she will mean the laugh.
The birthday card from 2015 is on a shelf in the study. He has kept it for eleven years and has never worked out why that one and not the others, and she knows exactly why, down to the crossed-out word.
It is the closest thing to being believed that she has ever had.
She made it that way on purpose.