Live and let live

One of the things that worked well yesterday when I broke, as Martha puts it, the 'present but not available' concept to my roommate, is that I didn't try to fix him. Sure, it strikes me that at his age, point in his career, etc., it would behoove one to recognize unambiguous social cues, but I am not his wife or his boss (he has one of each), and his personality is not for me to critique. I never liked it when my boss tried to assess and advise on my personality, and I don't like it when my mother does it. I kept my comments behavior-, rather than personality-oriented. He's a good guy, and I wasn't being nice when I said everything else was going well: he cleans, he's considerate, and he helps out with other stuff around the house even though I've made it clear that I don't expect him to. Why am I so proud of mastering this basic principle of conflict resolution? Because growing up, I only observed the opposite approach. Actually, that's not true; my dad exhibited more constructive, if sarcastic, behavioral skills, but they were drowned out, really, by mom's example. And mom's example was, to some extent still is, taking any behavior and turning it into a personality lecture. Which, as I've mentioned, is counterproductive as well as aggressive. This is how my parents might have handled a hypothetical situation:

Mom: YOU LEFT A WET TOWEL ON YOUR BED! YOU ALWAYS TAKE SHORTCUTS! YOU ARE SUCH A SLOB!

Dad: Might there be a better place for that wet towel than on your bed?

Which approach do you think was more likely to achieve the desired result? Mind you, if I were a smarta$$, I could have said, 'nope, my bed makes a great wet towel repository,' but even if I had, I would have gotten the point. Nothing about mom's strategy would have changed my behavior, because I would have focused on the insult.

Coming full circle to the roommate, maybe he thinks I should be flattered that he's trying to analyze my personality by asking me a bunch of questions, while maybe based on my experience with my mother, I don't appreciate anyone's trying to tell me about my personality. It's just a very different way of interacting with people, his is, that strikes me as ineffective; I'm not uninterested in people, and I think Myers-Briggs, etc., have their place (maybe) in large-scale operations like staffing people together, but I don't see the point in trying to understand one person by pigeonholing them to a four-point identity for which most people are in the middle anyway. If you want to get to know someone, pry less and observe more. But this is advice I won't be shelling out, first of all because I'm not interested in getting better known, and second because who am I to try to change someone who's happy the way he is?