Not long ago, someone commented on my blog and asked, “Is there any way to get just a casual INFJ friendship?” We INFJs have a reputation for approaching relationships with an all-or-nothing sort of attitude. Either we pour ourselves whole-heartedly into a relationship, or we keep the other person at a distance that might qualify them as acquaintances, but not friends.
It’s a stereotype, but like many stereotypes, there’s a kernel of truth at its core. INFJs crave deep connection. When we hit it off with someone new, there’s a temptation to share our souls with them and try to deepen the connection. For many of us, this has led to heartache when you realize the person you opened up to can’t be trusted, and we react by shielding our hearts and not letting new people get close. We sort people into levels of trusted and not-trusted and interact with them accordingly.
An all-or-nothing attitude towards relationships is not a sign of a healthy, mature INFJ. If we want to develop meaningful relationships, we have to learn how to let people get close. We also have to learn how to block damaging people from our lives.
Our tendency to sort people into categories based on whether or not we trust them and how close we’ll let them get can actually be a good tool for this, if we use it consciously to guard ourselves and to develop healthier relationships with people.
Acquaintances
These are the people we’ve just met or those who we’ve known for a while but still interact with at a “shallow” level. At this level, INFJs pretty much treat everyone the same, whether we like/agree with them or not. We don’t encourage deep conversations with acquaintances, we nod and smile when they’re talking to minimize risk of conflict, and we answer their questions in a brief, friendly way before making our escape.
Even people who we see frequently can stay on the acquaintance trust level indefinitely. It would include people we have to associate with but don’t agree with or trust. This might be the relative who argues and shouts whenever you see them at mandatory gatherings, your best friend’s emotionally draining mother, or an in-law who imposes their rigid political views on everyone else. These are people you have to be nice to but don’t necessarily want to be around.
Casual Friends
A step up from acquaintance is the casual friend, a category INFJs might be tempted to skip. We either want people in the friend category or keep them at arms-length as acquaintances. The people who I think of as casual friends usually have to contact me if they want to get together. I enjoy seeing them when we run into each other, but don’t go out of my way to make that happen.
INFJs actually have a good reason for limiting our interaction with most people. We have a limited amount of social energy so we usually spend it on the people we’re already close to or people we want in our close friend circle. This can, however, hold us back as we pursue deep friendships.
Cultivating casual friendships can be a good way to start deepening relationships with people and learning whether or not you can trust them. It’s also a good way to give people a second chance and not fall prey to judging them too quickly. You might find that someone you weren’t interested in talking to at first becomes a good friend upon further acquaintance.
Friends
The true friend category is where we INFJs keep people who we care deeply about but don’t feel like we can share all of our true selves with. It includes family members and friends who we have decided we cannot really confide in but still love deeply.
I’ve even heard from INFJs who feel their spouse falls into this category. Cultivating these friendships is one way to help fill your INFJ need for connection with other people. These people already care about you and you should be able to share your thoughts with them. Try opening up and see what happens. They might actually understand you more than you think they will.
Soul Friends
This is the inner circle, the people we trust and who we have let get close. It’s the type of friendship we’re searching for; the place where INFJs find the intimate emotional and intuitive connection we crave. Many INFJs only have one person in this category and some have yet to find this connection. It’s always a very small number of people.
I, personally, am blessed to have more than one soul-friend. They are the people I contact first when I get good news that makes me dance around the room or when I’m slammed by grief. They’re the ones I can tell anything and they’ll listen patiently as I try to sort my tangled thoughts out into words that make sense. It’s a beautiful thing and, for me, they’re relationships that developed and deepened over many years.
INFJs who are looking for soul friends can make the mistake of investing foul-friend levels of commitment in people who aren’t worthy. This often happens when we try to skip the “lower” levels of friendship and jump right to an intimate soul-connection. If this goes poorly, that’s when we feel like we have to do an “INFJ door slam” to disconnect from them. The closer someone gets, the worse it hurts us if they betray us.
Closing Thoughts
The effort to develop friendships on every level exercises your co-pilot extroverted Feeling (Fe) process and gives you opportunities for cultivating the deeper relationships you crave. Taking charge of getting people together by hosting a gathering at your house or organizing an outing can also have the added benefit of making socialization less awkward since you’re doing it on your own terms and have a better idea of what to expect.
Cultivating healthy friendships is a challenge for every personality type. For the sensitive, introverted INFJs, it can also feel intimidating or even dangerous. But it doesn’t have to be. We can choose to intentionally cultivate friendships at many different levels, eventually trust people and open up our hearts to them.
Marissa Baker
Contributor
Marissa Baker is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in web and print publications including eHow, Modern Mom, Boundless.org and Living Education. Her first ebook, The INFJ Handbook, is available in the Amazon Kindle store. Marissa’s passion for connecting with people through writing fuels her personal blog, where she shares thoughts on everything from psychology to Star Wars to religion.
This really hit home for me and is something I finally am starting to cultivate after many years of heartache. I still bare too much to people and then find out they may not be trustworthy, but it’s my “out of body” experience that tells me that AFTER I’ve shared. I then tread very carefully and well…..I’m in that place now, so I guess I’ll see how it goes. It feels very immature of me to slam the door on past friendships and I still struggle with that, but I will not and cannot close my heart to new connections. I’m just not designed that way I guess. Grateful. Thank you for sharing this!
This really hit home for me. I am very guilty of skipping the lower levels and jumping right into the relationship, because I am still desperately searching for a “soul friend”. I have had to use the Door Slam on more than one person, which has hurt my social life.
I am also guilty of keeping people in the “Acquaintances” or “Casual Friends” groups. I am not a fan of the “Casual Friends” group at all, but because of my problem with letting people get too close too quickly, I find it hard to make myself open up.
I do have several “true friends” as they are called in the article. These are friends I either grew up with or family members I am extremely close with. I have contemplated shifting one or two of those into the “soul friend” category, but one (an INTP) is very private and I don’t want to disturb him more than necessary, and the other is an ESFJ who doesn’t fully understand all of my abstract thinking and theories.
Thank you so much for this! It’s helped some things about me make a little more sense.
This article sums up INFJ friendships perfectly, especially the paragraph on soul friends. I invested heavily in a what I thought was a soul friend for the first time a few years ago. That friend turned out to not be worthy, and the pain was absolutely debilitating. I had to door slam her to recover. I have now let her back in but on a casual friend/friend level. I will think long and hard before making myself vulnerable like that again.
This is so incredibly accurate. Had a friendship with what I highly suspect was an ENTP who got close and into the inner sanctum if you will, way too fast. Upon reflection, I gave him trust that he didn’t earn really. It’s fairly easy to do when you’re in a vulnerable state. While that’s not something we regularly do (trust people immediately), I think we’re prone to let certain rare individuals in that fast because it’s so damned rare to find someone that you feel has the capacity to understand you. It’s lonely being an INFJ feeling like you understand people and can look behind their masks while you go pretty much most of your life feeling like no one can see through yours. When you do find that person it feels spiritual and dare I say like a miracle that they even exist. It’s easy to forget that someone understanding you has absolutely nothing to do with that person caring about you.
Very well said and I knew these things at 5. Our intuition is amazing.
Growing up an INFJ, I gradually learned, after a lot of tragic trial and error, I should add, to categorize groups of people that I come across on a daily basis. However, what I still struggling with, so much so that I plunge into bouts of depression, is how I seem to develop a lot of care for particular people, like an INFJ would, but I am heartbroken when they don’t reciprocate the same level of care and understanding. It really saddens me that the deep level of understanding and care I give to people, they don’t acknowledge it nor make any attempt to return it. I just don’t know how to bring myself to deal with something like that.
Perhaps it is just me, but I feel that the lower energy of an introvert also plays into this. I do not have the energy to be close friends with a lot of people and I do not have the energy to be casually friends with a wide circle either. Of course, I am not only an INFJ but I also live with a chronic illness so that probably factors in.