For those of you indulging in my blog that haven’t done so already, I encourage you to take a Myers-Briggs personality test. It’s incredibly revealing about you, your personality, and the quirks that made you YOU. Each of the letters stand for a different trait: extroverted or introverted, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, and judgment or perception.

Anyhow LBCM (aka Left-Brained-Code-Monkey, aka my husband) and I broke down and took the aforementioned personality test after a few months of communication-breakdowns-that-are-common-in-most-relationships. I couldn’t grasp how he could look over the emotional content of my speech and, inversely, he didn’t fathom why I couldn’t merely stick to the facts. Thanks to one of my office-mates, we got our hot little hands on two copies of the Myers-Briggs bubble sheet test and sat down one night to properly analyze our personalities and compare/contrast.

Let me give you a little back story; LBCM and I met during college. We were in band together (yes, I married a band geek…what’s even more telling is I married the SON of a band director!), likes some of the same music, and clicked instantly. To be honest, I thought our personalities would have some similarities in the letter department. My money was on the last couplet.

Nope.

Not even.

I’m a gregarious ENFP, he’s a level-headed ISTJ.

ENFPs are, in a word, whirlwinds. We’re the unerring optimists of the world, the Tiggers if you want to compare us to a Pooh character. We love love, affection, culture, stimulation…you name it, we can find a way to make it fun. We also tend to cling tightly to our ideals and borderline idolize people and believe nothing but the best about them. We see the world in colors and emotions.

LBCM is a typical ISTJ. Things are methodical and need to be planned. Emotions don’t matter as much; facts prevail over all. They are meticulous when it comes to details and follow rules to the word of the law. I would call them almost boring, but LBCM corrects me and uses the term “consistent”. Bleagh, boring to me. They see the world in black and white, in absolutes.

Basically, it’s the free spirit artist farm girl married the regimented engineer city boy. We’re about as different as different can get.

Yes, it makes certain things really, really, REALLY hard.

But, I bring out LBCM’s spontaneous side and he grounds me. He helps me think logically and I remind him of the importance of emotions.

It ain’t perfect, but it works.

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