Personality tests:
On the Myers-Briggs test (MTBI) I often get placed as an INTJ, and after reading all of the categories I consider myself an INTJ with some INTP traits. If you aren't familiar with this personality test, it's a test developed by Myers based on Carl Jung's ideas. INTJs are often described as 'architects' or 'masterminds'. Sites like to list examples of people such as Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, and even Newton. It's important to remember two things though: Personality tests test personality and not intelligence, and what the purpose of personality tests are.
Think of it this way: An INTP that likes to develop new theories looking at the world just means that person likes to develop new theories. The theories might be good, but they might also be garbage. Just because the people best at this are people like Einstein in no way means an INTP is anything like Einstein. I find it funny how 16Personalities keeps talking about how some personality is rare. If you split the population into 16 categories, guess what? In all likelihood each group will be "rare", at less than 10% of the population. Big freakin' deal. I guess we all want to feel special, just like everybody else.
Personality tests like MTBI allow me to quickly describe my personality using four letters. It's convenient. Actually getting to know me requires you to interact with me in various situations. The people that watched me on my Maplestory streams back in the day saw one limited aspect of me, where I knew I was being watched and my moves scrutinized, trying to entertain an audience. The people that I interacted with in my guild knew me as I talked about random stuff and complained about being bored. The people on Discord see me type about my thoughts on some issues, or even hear me speak, recognizing my figures of speech and the qualities of my speech. But none of that lets you know how I do things in my house, or how I walk, act at work, or random mannerisms I make with my body. We are much more complicated than four letters.
MTBI can be misused. If I hired people based on a personality test, I might get a uniformity in thought that ends up being counterproductive. Personality tests are here for our convenience and to get us to think about ourselves. And even in the latter part of its function it can be misused. It is the job of the test to describe us, not for us to conform to the categories laid out by the test. Otherwise, we end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy where we end up as slaves to the test. And finally, be aware that humans in general have a lot of similarities since we are all the same species. It's possible to come up with a vague set of characteristics that fit most people (eg, I am social sometimes, but I have periods of introversion. In other words, every person ever.)
How does this relate to love?
It makes sense that I would strive to obtain characteristics I want, meaning it makes sense I would be an INTJ since I value the strengths of INTJs. But for a while I internalized its weaknesses. I felt I didn't need anyone. I am the cold, rational INTJ! I let a test affect how I acted and that was a mistake.
I have never been really close to anyone, ever. My relationship with my father faded as I moved to America and my father stayed behind in Taiwan to hold the fort financially. My mother and I argued a lot about video games when I was younger. Part of it is just how I am. Maybe something's missing in my brain and I can't have very strong familial bonds. But I have been upset for quite a while over unrequited love. And in the case of that unrequited love, we weren't THAT close anyways. I think I am capable of deeply loving a romantic partner.
But I just didn't think about it that much. I wasn't suffering being alone, and while my mother and brother were worriers, I was more relaxed. I chucked it up to my emotional resilience. Maybe I am more emotionally resilient than the average person, but maybe not. Maybe I simply wasn't tested enough, having never lost somebody that meant everything to me. I felt it was good to be very independent, but after 6 months of not speaking to anyone, I ended up at a friend's house and the act of speaking started to feel strange. I would speak really quickly and end up with a word vomit. That's when I knew I had gone overboard.
Not feeling like I am missing out on that much means I feel like there isn't much of a problem. However, that itself is the problem. Not wanting intimacy a lot means I won't go out searching for a mate and reach these peak human experiences. It's very possible to not know what one is missing. I know physical intimacy will cause a rush of hormones to my brain that makes me feel the best I have ever felt in my entire life. Perhaps once I get a taste, I would not settle for less. Being okay with the okay dooms one to mediocrity.
But deeply loving somebody means opening myself up and being far more vulnerable to anyone than I have ever been in my life. Real vulnerability only comes with great highs, because if I had a terrible relationship I probably couldn't wait to get out of it instead. Pursuing intimacy and a love of my life means opening myself up to extreme highs and extreme lows.
We are all human. No matter your beliefs in the afterlife, the only life we can be sure of is this one. We're on this earth for several decades, and then we are gone. If only we could use this knowledge to stop our everyday neurosis about petty things that don't matter, and to truly love, laugh, and enjoy this life... We are born, we grow, we reach adulthood, and from there we slowly head towards death as the sun sets. Either I die or my wife dies first. There will be loss and extreme pain, but hopefully by then the love and happiness would've been worth it.
Sex
I used to think post-orgasm, with prolactin spiking and dopamine crashing, that evolution has won again; here it has caused me to act in a way I otherwise would not. That's the wrong way to think about sexual appetite. I don't apply that train of thought to eating, for example. Evolution gave us these desires - to eat, sleep, drink, or fuck. It boils down to dopamine hits - so in a way, we are all drug addicts.
I think casual sex or prostitution is fine, but it has to be treated with caution. Physical intimacy can cause emotional intimacy. I worry in a friends-with-benefits situation that one of us will end up attached to the other, causing an awkward situation.
Recent changes in opinion
After going on estrogen for a while, I was lying on my bed one day when all of a sudden I thought to myself, 'You know what would be nice right now? If there was somebody next to me in bed I could cuddle with.' This was interesting because I've never had that type of thought in my life before. Since then I've grown to crave physical intimacy, with sex just being a subset of that. I have a recurring fantasy recently where a girlfriend holds my waist from behind and kisses me on my neck. I could feel the warmth of her body as I turned around to smile.
While I was never only interested in sex, I feel that many men, and even myself to some extent, are/were too myopic when they just think about sex. Sex can also be about emotional bonding, as our brains swim in oxytocin. I would make sure my partner is enjoying it as much as I am, because not only is it important to me on a relationship level, it makes me very happy to make my partner happy. I am flexible in giving or receiving in foreplay, or to be the little or the big spoon.
This newfound craving for cuddling and to be held can be difficult because horniness can be fixed with porn. Human touch... not so much. This led to an increase in loneliness. And you know what? I'm not ashamed to say that. Sometimes people make lonely guys the butt of jokes. I'm a bit more sensitive to that now. Loneliness is a valid human emotion. We are social animals. We want to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering, and loneliness is a negative emotion. It almost feels more taboo to admit one is lonely than to admit one is depressed, when loneliness can cause depression.
Maybe the changes in my mental state weren't due to estrogen, and simply the act of going through with my transition caused me to evolve as a person. Probably both are contributing causes. Surely if estrogen therapy can shrink the volume of the brain, something is going on in there.
Finding a mate
There are problems with reaching my objective. I am a trans woman that is still developing physically. I don't want to date today because it's not fair to my partner for changing on them a few years in. I would also be less desirable the more masculine I look. Even if transition goes well, lesbians are still nowhere near as common as straight women even when talking about women instead of men. Of the lesbians, even less are into transgender people. I might not even be into transgender people. A friend of mine recently responded well by saying that connecting with somebody else emotionally can often fill in the gaps and cause relationships to work.
We have this hypothetical girl in our minds that we would date, with numerous criteria, when in fact in life there is no one perfect soul mate, and we just find somebody we love and we stay with them. Of course, there are exceptions. I vaguely recalling somebody from OKCupid claiming that from crunching their numbers, despite people saying religion matters in their mate selection, it actually doesn't matter much. But if I go to Christian Mingle, I'm sure that would not be the case. I do not want a religious girlfriend for example, not just because it would drive me crazy due to that alone, but also because it is a symptom of a larger problem; it is an incompatible way of looking at the world.
How does one find a mate? Some people are lucky and the right person drops into their lap. Sometimes one has to go out and date constantly. Some people are just really unlucky. There are millions and millions of women in America alone, so there are probably multiple people I would totally be willing to spend the rest of my life with. But finding one...? It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I'd be swimming in a sea of possibilities, lost and washed ashore.
Emotionally I feel that the odds are very bad. Often we only like 1 or 2 people, and probably less than 10 in our lives. What are the chances that A likes B but B also likes A and it ends up working out long term? What are the odds?!
I don't meet new people anymore. I don't go to college. I'm just here at home in front of my computer, and I don't even play online video games much. I think a dating site would be the way to go, that way I can pre-screen out non-lesbians. This is one problem among many that transgender people face: Lifetime of loneliness because nobody wants them. It is what it is.
Misc & Closing
A conversation on a stock trading Discord server ended up talking about how somebody doesn't want a partner because they are too expensive. I've always felt a relationship should be a 50/50 affair unless one side is far richer than the other. In that case the key is open, honest, and direct communication. But more importantly, my goal in life isn't to accumulate as much wealth as humanly possible. My goal is to be happy and live a fulfilling life. If we remove housing cost benefits of living together, remember that you can be happier and poorer or richer and miserable. I can't take my money with me when I die.
It's hard to say just how good of a girlfriend I would be, or how depressed I would be if I was dumped. Not only would I be trying to figure out how I would feel in a situation I've never been in, I would be doing so for a future version of me that's different than me today, because the experience of finding and being with somebody would surely change me as a person. It would probably give me plenty of new things to say about life at the very least.
Speaking of change, some guy on a pickup artist forum once said that high school relationships are not a waste of time even though most of them don't work out in the long run. That's because it is an experience which we learn, grow, and evolve from, just like any other major life experience.
I for one, agree.
Who will I be and how would I feel 5 years from now as I re-read this post from the future? I intend to find out.
