8th entry for 20th Nov.

This week Mr. Hawthorne said to me it’s quite vital to a man’s moral and mental health to meet people with much different personalities than his. So different that you shouldn’t appreciate or be interested in each others’ pursuits and virtues at the first time. His experiences were totally restricted to his job, so we could call them brief, or at least one-sided and analytic, compared to my cases. Because I believe, I got somewhat further with this idea.

I find it very important in any kind of personal relationship how different are the two persons and by what means. We all tend to be happy finding friends, partners, consorts, etc. with whom we are so alike that we feel from the first moments as if “we came from the same distant planet.” I guess most people met someone like that. I would say, having one person like that can be dangerous, and choosing that person as a life companion could be fatal to your personality. Let’s see what the defect is here, studying the other extreme.

That is, of course, the type with whom there’s a complete emotional and mental incompatibility, providing a total communicational breakdown, if there’s not one already. With that person you would be each others’ perfect source to learn and experience new ways of thinking and living, and likely, you would excel in things the other does not, which would make you two extremely beneficial to each other. But certainly, there’s no way achieving that with such a person. So my choice usually is to find those who are so different that the relationship with them is not always comfortable and may consume a relevant amount of energy, yet at this cost we’re able to keep a clear and stable channel of communication both in the intellectual and emotional sense, having a constructive relationship rather than a supportive one. Of course you might get lonely a bit having only this type of people around you, that’s an issue to be careful about.