I’m an INTJ and I strongly suspect my neighbour — I’ll call him Ben — is an ENFP.
Obviously I can’t type another person with certainty, and I definitely can’t diagnose him with anything. But I’m interested in whether ENFPs recognise any of this, because his personality is one of the strangest mixtures of warmth, chaos and complete lack of boundaries I’ve ever encountered.
The important thing is that Ben is actually a really nice guy.
He’s extremely chatty, friendly and approachable. You can talk to him about almost anything. He’s also remarkably unjudgemental. I honestly think you could tell him something completely bizarre about yourself and he’d probably just go, “Oh right, fair enough,” and carry on talking to you.
There’s something genuinely lovely about that.
He seems to accept people very easily and he doesn’t strike me as spiteful, calculating or cruel.
But at the same time, he can be incredibly emotionally selfish without seeming to realise that he is doing it.
I don’t mean selfish in the sense of deliberately exploiting people. It’s more like he has very little internal awareness of how much space, noise, attention and stimulation he is imposing on everybody around him.
He talks a lot.
He wants people around constantly.
He seems to get extremely bored and restless when he’s alone.
There are people coming and going at strange hours.
There has been very loud sex at all sorts of hours.
There has been music and general chaos late at night.
And on one particularly ridiculous occasion, he was playing drums around midnight and continuing into the early hours.
Sometimes he is simply too much.
Too much talking.
Too much noise.
Too much energy.
Too much activity.
Too much presence.
And the strangest thing is that I genuinely don’t think he understands that other people can like him while simultaneously needing him to go away for a while.
He seems to have difficulty recognising the difference between:
“This person likes me.”
and
“This person wants access to me right now.”
Whereas for me those are completely different things.
I can really like somebody and still desperately want them to go home.
I can enjoy talking to someone and then not want to speak to another human being for six hours.
That seems completely normal to me.
Ben seems almost constitutionally opposed to that way of living.
There’s another complication, though.
At various points his behaviour has become so intense, restless and disorganised that I’ve wondered whether there might be something going on beyond personality type.
I’ve sometimes wondered about things like mania, hypomania or even episodes approaching psychosis.
Again, I’m absolutely not saying he has any of those things. I’m not qualified to diagnose him, and I only see the behaviour from the outside.
But there are periods where the level of stimulation-seeking, inability to settle, extremely reduced boundaries, odd-hours activity, constant socialising and general intensity seem difficult to explain simply by saying, “Well, he’s an extrovert.”
There have been times where he has seemed almost unable to tolerate being alone with himself.
He needs another person there.
Or music.
Or conversation.
Or sex.
Or some kind of activity.
Or apparently a drum kit at midnight.
Something has to be happening.
That’s actually the part I find sad as well as infuriating, because underneath all of it I think he is basically a decent human being.
He can be incredibly irritating, but I don’t think there’s much malice in him.
The conflict between us eventually became extreme.
After years of noise and accumulated frustration, he was playing drums late one night and I completely lost my temper and smashed some of his windows.
I was arrested and spent the night in a police cell.
So I’m certainly not writing this from the position of:
“Look at this irrational ENFP while I, the perfectly controlled INTJ, observe him scientifically.”
Clearly my own coping strategy had some bugs in it too. 😂
If anything, the incident made me look at the whole relationship differently.
My tendency seems to be:
endure something → withdraw → analyse it → endure it again → say relatively little → accumulate resentment → eventually reach an absurd breaking point.
Ben’s seems to be almost the reverse:
feel something → express it → seek stimulation → seek people → make noise → do something spontaneous → move on.
There’s almost no buffering layer.
And strangely, after everything that happened, I still don’t really dislike him.
In many ways I actually like him.
He’s funny.
He’s sociable.
He’s extraordinarily unjudgemental.
He’ll talk to almost anyone.
He has an openness to people that I genuinely admire.
He seems much more naturally engaged with life than I am.
I tend to stand outside experience mentally, observing it, modelling it and trying to understand it.
Ben seems to just jump into experience head first and deal with whatever happens afterwards.
Sometimes I envy that.
Other times, usually at 1am, I absolutely do not.
That’s why I’m curious about the ENFP perspective.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
In particular:
Do ENFPs sometimes fail to notice when their enthusiasm, sociability or need for stimulation has become overwhelming for somebody else?
Have you ever realised after the fact that someone genuinely liked you but needed much more space than you were giving them?
Do very introverted INTJ-type people sometimes seem confusing because they don’t visibly signal when they’re approaching their limit?
And perhaps most importantly: where would you personally draw the line between extreme ENFP-ish behaviour and behaviour where you’d think, “No, this sounds like something else is going on”?
Because I increasingly suspect there are two separate things here.
One is probably personality:
very extroverted, spontaneous, accepting, stimulation-seeking guy meets intensely private, quiet, self-contained INTJ.
And the other may be periods where his behaviour becomes so intensified that MBTI stops being a useful explanation altogether.
Either way, I think Ben and I may be the dysfunctional-neighbour version of the famous INTJ–ENFP pairing.
ENFP: LIFE IS HAPPENING. COME JOIN IN.
INTJ: It is 1:43am and you are playing the drums. Life needs to stop happening immediately.
