Point Four: The Romantic

Four in Love
Living with Fours:

• Remember that Fours feel that something is missing. Others have what's missing. Focused on the quality of feeling in other people's relationships, the Four worries: "They have it. I don't."
• You can easily be dismayed by your Four's attraction to the distant and the unavailable, positive attention to whoever is missing: the ghostly lover, the distant friend, the unfulfilled dream.
• Count on complex relating. Nothing is simple. Depth is the goal rather than fun.
• Expect impatience with the "flatness" of ordinary feeling. "Surely there is more than this." Relating is intensified by sabotage, suffering, and dramatic acts.
• For Fours the present seems unreal. All relating is building toward the emergence of the "real" self through the agency of love. The ultimate disclosure, the transcendent moment, the reawakening of the soul.
• It's always showtime: mood, manners, luxury, and good taste as a setting for relationship. Unique self-presentation compensates for inner feelings of deprivation. The art form of keeping feelings contained. Conversational innuendo, aesthetic distance, the implication of a special glance. Relating through romantic idealization.
• For Fours, it's the pursuit not the happiness that matters: a refined and bittersweet emotional sensibility. A mood of melancholy. Love is many layered and goes through many phases. The stages of letting go are unusually slow.
• Fours sweetly reminisce about people from the past and focus on lovers, experiences yet to come. Attention on present opportunities are weak and intermittent.
• Push-pull habit of attention. The Four's focus turns to your negative aspects when you are present and to positive aspects with the safety of distance.
• This way of paying attention reinforces the Four's feelings of abandonment and loss, but also lends itself to:
• Sensitivity to your emotional states and the ability to support you when you suffer pain.

Four at Work
In the Workplace:

• Wants distinctive work. A job that calls for creativity, even genius, an eccentric edge in presentation, a unique approach to business life.
• Must feel respected in the workplace for personal vision and ideas.
• Efficiency is tied to mood. Attention gets displaced from tasks when emotional life takes over. Can sabotage business life over a love affair.
• Wants to be connected to special authority, to those in the field who stand for quality rather then popularity.
• Feels demeaned by plebeian work, the definition of which is different for every Four. Gardening can be work for plebs. So can being a CEO.
• Feels called to emotionally intense lines of work: grief counselor, animal rights activist, the suicide hot line late at night.
• Aggressive and cutting toward competitors or peers in the same field. Attracted to successful people outside his or her own sphere of interest.
• Does not flourish in a work environment that requires close cooperation with others who are more skilled, more valued, or better paid.

Helen Palmer

The Enneagram in Love & Work:
Understanding Your Intimate & Business Relationships
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, 417 pages