Openness

The online dating site PlentyOfFish.com (PoF) gives you the option to take a personality test.  It describes your personality in a lot of different areas, and describes how these will impact your relationships.  Although it got most of me right, and this blog is about one area that I think it got right, that I am highly open to try to new things.  It had a caution attached to this: "But, your openness might occasionally cause a certain degree of dependency on your end because you may be so open that you easily adopt the preferences and habits of your partners and gradually relinquish things that make you so unique."  I found this intriguing and thought-provoking.

I can totally see what it's saying.  It's like that movie Runaway Bride.  In it, Julia Roberts' character likes her eggs cooked in whatever way her current fiance likes his eggs cooked.  If he likes them scrambled, so does she.  If the next one likes them over-easy, that's her favorite way to eat them.  SPOILER (sorta):  In the end, she finds herself, and realizes that she doesn't even like eggs!  I've considered this phenomenon in relation to myself, but haven't thought hard about it.  The PoF survey should make me stop and think.  If I'm so open to new things, it might be really easy to conform to who I'm with.  Especially since I think that I'm the kind of partner who wants to spend lots of time with their significant other, so that necessitates that we participate in the same activities.  I don't want to drop my activities to do theirs! 

I'm now more aware that it's a challenge of mine to keep my own things, my own quirks and unique hobbies.  At the beginning of relationships, I find it exciting to learn about the person's life, to participate in their activities and meet their friends.  May be because so much of that would be new to me.  I imagine that most of these things would quickly become "not new" for me, and I'd want to continue to seek out new and exciting activities, though.  I guess I need to find someone who is as passionate as I am for trying new things.

Also, I highly value independence, so being dependent on someone because I adapt to their (more stable?  sedentary?) habits and interests is problematic for me, fundamentally.


Finally, how did PoF get me wrong?  It said that I wasn't rigid or linear.  Seriously?  If you've read the Coffee Day blog, or know me AT ALL, you know that PoF totally got it wrong on that one!