Lessons from an INTP-ESFP relationship with ADHD/autism in play

I had a short-lived relationship with an ESFP. It was basically one month of low-key pure bliss followed by one month of painful disconnection after I made an important but also circumstantially unpreventable mistake. Her ADHD and autistic traits as well as my own (clinically unconfirmed) autistic tendencies were probably a large factor in our dynamic.

I would summarize her as:

• Caring and proactively serving to friends
• Honest and direct
• Flirty and sassy
• Intelligent but not being challenged to use her brain much in life
• Cute and child-like
• High acceptance energy, non-judgmental
• Highly experienced with therapy and problem-solving methods that one typically only learns through therapy and related experiences
• Literal
• Fashionable
• Hedonistic and moderately experience-seeking
• Love languages are ambiguously split between physical touch, quality time and acts of service
• Sex-positive but not the ONS type
• Not a jealous type, unexplored interest in open relationship dynamics
• Feminist and LGBTQI-friendly
• Ramble-friendly
• Patient (for most things)
• Highly illogical, poor at explaining things
• Very comfort-zone based
• Practical with spending money on things that make her happy
• Partially self-aware but doesn’t understand herself well, introspection is highly delayed
• Unreliable at giving feedback and knowing how to respond to others expressing their emotions
• Self-centric empathy: high empathic concern but poor cognitive and emotional empathy
• A social climber who dislikes social climbing behaviors in others

Things were great at the start (and I didn’t have to guess whether she was into me!), we were becoming intense friends before she revealed her crush. I saw high potential because she effortlessly ticked off all of my practical/logistical compatibility concerns in a relationship, which is no common feat.

It’s no great tragedy that we turned out to be incompatible, but there are some significant insights I picked up that are especially key within the INTP-ESFP dynamic and in the context of neurodiversity differences in relationships.

1. ESFP truths are fleeting

ESFPs are known to be honest, and they usually are when it comes to objective information. However, this is not the case for opinions, interpretations, disagreements, or conflict resolution, where they may blurt something out in the heat of the moment that they don’t actually believe. They’re not intentionally lying, but what they want to say in the moment may not hold up to later scrutiny. Because their word isn’t meant to be absolute, they can unwittingly mislead people for a long time and see no need to correct it because they didn’t know what they said wouldn’t hold up and past words aren’t meant to be future precedent anyway.

I learned the hard way that autism doesn’t really change this equation about fleeting honesty and can make it worse because it can increase the time required for an ESFP to tune into how they actually feel about something.

2. ESFPs really suck at logic

I’ve always found it easy to talk to ESFPs but also hard to get into intellectual conversations about anything. This is because of their tertiary Te. Even when they know a lot about a subject, their knowledge lacks systematic organization and so they end up talking around and about a subject without being able to answer critical thinking questions using chains of logic.

Asking an ESFP what they think about a new topic they just learned about: don’t expect anything they say to make sense.

Asking an ESFP a critical thinking question about a topic they have experience in: don’t expect anything they say on the fly to make sense.

Asking an ESFP to think about a question within their expertise and get back to you: expect a more confident answer but still without chains of logic.

3. ESFPs require long feedback loops to improve and they don’t like them

So ESFPs are bad at logic but the only way they can sharpen up is to vocalize that bad logic and slowly realize that it’s bad. That’s why attempts at intellectual conversations with ESFPs are often either them listening without being able to critically contribute, or them presenting their thoughts and having no idea if what they said was helpful/accurate while you can only gently rephrase questions to try and eke something out of them.

ESFPs are highly sensitive to criticism and tend to react with defensiveness, so an ESFP coming to realize their logic flawed is often either going to be 1) completely futile, or 2) a really long and concerted effort.

4. ESFPs will always put their own feelings first

We established that ESFP truths are fleeting, and a big part of this is that they often place their feelings at the center of truth. They can subtly and unintentionally manipulate their partners by making them feel guilty based on flexing truths about how they feel and how they interpret things in the relationship. If an ESFP ever develops ill feelings, their view of the relationship, their previous intentions, and their responsibilities are self-justified in shifting arbitrarily and you might not even be kept in the loop. When an ESFP feels wronged or let down, trying to have an interactive conversation with both sides being heard is likely to be a doomed approach. They won’t budge an inch if you don’t take their side first.

Once you take their side, apologize unreservedly and take full responsibility for your actions. They’ll probably keep resenting you and it’s still not your chance to have your side heard. They might allow you to speak but their truth is already set by the compass that is their feelings.

This can be a really unfair dynamic especially if the only way you could have avoided disappointing them was by being a mind-reader. Asking them what they need/want/expect doesn’t work because they don’t know and whatever answer they give will likely expire within hours or days. The fact is they don’t know until the thing has already happened. They just want you to be able to intuit their needs through observation and past life experience. ESFPs also may employ reverse logic to use out-of-order evidence to justify their current interpretation of the truth. For example, if they messed up first and you messed up in response, they might use your mistake to justify why they didn’t mess up at all and why it’s all on you.

If you’re in this situation but still want to try and make things work, you have to try and work to the mechanics of the ESFP feelings-truth feedback system.

• Logic is your worst friend in this situation, even mature emotional logic won’t work.
• The key strategy is to avoid the root cause and distract them from their negative emotions by inducing positive ones.
• Make them laugh. Take them on a fun date. Give them a meaningful gift, or something as simple as buying them snacks that you know they like. Take care of chores or other unexciting burdens for them.
• Assuming that you’ve already taken their side and apologized sincerely, do not proactively talk about that event ever again. Pretend it never happened unless they bring it up. Don’t feel bad about it or try to apologize any further, it will only make things worse.
• Don’t ask them anything as they’ll be unhelpful while holding a grudge (this may happen subconsciously on their part). Ask their friends or your friends for advice on what makes them happy and just do it. Worst case, trial and error is your only chance.
• Their feelings are the point of reference for the truth, so ideally with this approach they’ll be reminded of good things about the relationship, feel cared for enough to be willing to rethink and process past hurt like a mature adult, and then you can hopefully move forward at their pace. Your insights or solutions are not welcome if they come too far ahead of theirs even if they would otherwise eventually come to the same conclusions. If you are lucky, they will keep you in the loop as they rethink. If not, then you just have to wait for the dice of judgment.

5. ESFPs are not empaths

ESFPs feel intensely, but even when they have high empathic concern this is generally going to be sympathy or self-centric projections of suffering (typical for Fi users) rather than tuning in to what the other person is actually feeling. ESFPs typically lack in both intuition and cognitive ability for understanding other people’s nuanced emotions and their causes. Even if they are capable of understanding, it’s likely to be hard to discover whether they are able and willing in the first place because it goes against the grain of how they naturally operate. ESFPs don’t like to change for others and have little patience or desire to work on relationship issues, big or small. They want things to just work and have no problem walking away if they don’t.

Neurodiversity does not change this fact. ADHD/autism probably make it harder for the ESFP to convey signs of listening and give appropriate feedback.

6. INTPs will always struggle to feel heard by an ESFP

Part of the dynamic with any extroverted partnership for an INTP is that the INTP will typically invest the majority of their social energy into the partnership while the extrovert is less likely to. ESFPs are unlikely to meet an INTP’s intellectual and emotional needs by just being their usual outgoing selves with the INTP, due to the abovementioned mismatch in inability to have nuanced discussions both for logical and emotional topics.

ADHD and autism make this worse because ADHDers tend to interrupt a lot while autists may have the tendency to start sharing random facts/memories in response and derail the attempted communication by the INTP.

7. Be prepared for trial and error

Don’t expect an ESFP to give 50/50 (let alone 100/100) to a relationship even after going exclusive. ESFPs learn about themselves through trial and error, and relationships are no different. You are one iteration of the trial, and it’s far more convenient for an ESFP to move onto the next trial if things don’t fit together effortlessly than to attempt to make things work. They don’t want to bother, and honestly it makes sense for them because they will learn more quickly through varied relationships and experiences anyway. So keep this in my early on and don’t sit on more uncertainty than you’re comfortable with bearing.

Learnings specific to myself

• Words are not a primary love language for me, but simultaneously words are very important, carry a lot of power, and I have a need for emotional precedence to be set explicitly through words. (Common ASD trait.)
• I like to have high levels of feedback and prefer a partner who can reliably articulate themselves.
• I’m quite naïvely trusting in terms of taking someone’s word as reliable truth. (Common ASD trait.)
• I really dislike being punished for not being a mind-reader and won’t tolerate it in future, but I also do need to be more chill in terms of trying things without knowing.
• I should be more vocal about my needs and wants. This will lead to finding out faster whether there’s true compatibility.
• I need to be more assertive about my boundaries and try to ensure that dating someone doesn’t hinder my personal well-being or encroach on my need for time management.
• I still believe that friends first is my preferred approach and that I’d prefer my long-term partner to be a best friend.
• Given that someone I’m dating is likely to take up most of my social time within a week, it’s a red flag if my deeper friendship needs like presence and being heard and understood reliably can’t be met easily.
• Not everyone can or will want to understand me deeply and this is a valid yellow flag if absent.
• My chameleon instincts turn on really strong, I’m not really sure if this is good, bad, or neither.
• Despite receiving little positive feedback on this throughout my lifetime, there are people out there who find me (physically) highly attractive.
• Apparently I have a higher than normal chance of clicking with people with ADHD. There’s definitely been a lot of attraction in being with someone who can perceive and appreciate many of my autistic-spectrum quirks too.