When I say this, I don’t mean that we don’t value human companionship. In fact, I would argue to the contrary. However, our introversion causes us to drain our energy as we attempt to socialize. Our energy stems from within ourselves rather than from being with other people. We value solitude, silence and thought.

To us, silence truly is golden.

As a result, parties are definitely not our favourite place to be and when forced to be in such an environment, we tend to stick to the sides of the room rather than gravitating toward the centre. We are extremely conscious of our personal space and absolutely hate being touched (in any way, shape or form) without our permission. Likewise, incessant noise drives us mad, prevents us from thinking and makes us want to scream at everybody to “shut up.”

We find it astounding that some people can manage to say the same thing three times in different words or that someone can fill an hour of time with words that mean nothing. We value conciseness when it comes to speaking, such that we say nothing more than what needs to be said (and sometimes we can’t even say that much).

If you tell me something confidential, you really can trust me not to tell a soul –ever. After a fun night out, one of my friends always says, “now, you’ve got to remember not to tell anyone about this night,” to which I respond by rolling my eyes and saying “who’s talking?”

You may have picked up on the fact that the others always find out, but that it’s never me that does the telling.

Seriously, my lips once sealed are sealed forever (unless your life depends on it, and I’ve made a logical deduction that your life is worth more to me than my loyalty to the promise).

We are extremely hard to impress.

We are extremely logical thinkers and as a result, we analyze everything. If I turn on a recording of a Shostakovich symphony and find that it isn’t to my liking, I will turn it off and pick a different recording of the same piece, just performed by a different orchestra.

When it comes to argumentation, INTJs easily recognize fallacies (whether we say so out loud or not is an entirely different matter). We love and actually crave intellectual debate, such that we often engage in it without realizing that the other people present may not be in the mood for it. The result…people just think we’re being rude. In actuality, we get high off of intelligent conversation.

The downside to this is that our hard-to-impress side lends to us getting bored with people who don’t talk about anything we consider to be interesting. Small talk, the weather, celebrity gossip, etc. All quite possibly boring to us. 

The number one rule to remember when it comes to talking with an INTJ is never to be offended if we openly disagree with you. If we’re debating with you politely, it means you’ve caught our interest and we’ve judged you a good conversation partner.

A negative trait that comes with this, particularly for less-mature INTJs, is that stupidity can be extremely annoying to us, and we might not respond politely.

When it comes to more mature INTJs, I might explain this more specifically by stating that its more willful ignorance (not stupidity) that bothers us. I can stand a person who fails to see logic, but one who does so while insisting otherwise is completely out of the question. Those people, I won’t even bother expressing my true opinions to. I mean, what’s the point?

It’s people who want to be “one of the intellectuals,” but don’t have the discipline to educate themselves who bother us –the ones that insist they are right without providing any evidence, and who willfully ignore all the evidence that we give to back up our arguments.

We lead from the back, whilst letting others believe they are in the front.

This doesn’t mean that we manipulate people, although there are definitely some among us who do (I personally don’t condone such behaviour).

It means that while there may be an extravert at the front of the line, INTJs are silently leading from underneath and asking for nothing in return. In fact, we prefer our leadership to go unnoticed and as a result, we actually make an effort to keep it a secret. One excellent, fictional example of this type of behaviour is Bruce Wyane (Christopher Nolan’s version).

He puts up a front in public, pretending to be something he’s not, while his true leadership –all his positive qualities– hide beneath the mask of Batman. Dear friends believe that he is an idiot who wastes his time and has no leadership skills because that’s all they see of him, when in reality, he is something entirely different.

It hurts to have friends and family see you that way, but still, we hide the good that we do underneath a mask of our bad qualities. We let others believe that they are the leaders, when in truth, it is us.

We are not easily offended.

In order for me to be offended, I must first value your opinion of me. It’s rare for me to grow close enough to someone that I actually care what they think of me (thus our tendency to hide our good qualities). That said, the few relationships that I have been blessed to cherish are highly valuable to me.

If a school friend tells me I’m a loser with no life, I probably won’t think twice about it, but the same doesn’t hold true if my Mom were to make a similar comment.

Ender Wiggin is another one of my favourite fictional INTJs. He has a few select people whose opinions he values, but otherwise, he doesn’t care. His teachers turn him into a social outcast by making a favourite of him, but Ender reacts extremely positively to his peer’s negative treatment. While emotional personality types would fall into loneliness and depression as a result of such treatment, Ender really doesn’t care.

We won’t chase your love.

INTJs are often portrayed in fiction as mechanical, lacking feelings and bearing little-to-no sex-drive. Contrary to popular belief, we do actually experience emotion and attraction, although I would definitely agree that many INTJs (myself included) are asexual. If we are interested in being friends with or dating someone, we’ll put forth some effort, but if the other person isn’t interested, we will often walk away unaffected.

The reason is simple and based purely on logic. While highly emotional personality types might chase someone’s companionship, INTJs recognize disinterest in another individual. Following this recognition, we literally make a logical decision to accept what we can’t control.

You can imagine how very freeing this trait can be. It saves us quite a lot of heartbreak and emotional turmoil, although it’s a little bit more difficult to do when it comes to relationships that we’ve already built. For instance, if my already-established significant other were to decide to leave me, I doubt I would be able to apply this type of logic to prevent myself from emotionally shutting down. However, when it comes to the majority of relationships –we have so few of them that we actually consider to be true— walking away is the easiest decision in the world.

This is not to say that we won’t always be there for you if you decide that you need us. We understand when to back off. If you decide to come back, or that you need us, we will often readily be there to support you, unless we perceive you to be taking advantage of us. 

We are probably analyzing you.

Yes, we are introverts who interact little, but we actually have an astute understanding of human nature and human motives. People think that INTJs lack social skills, but in reality, we have excellent social skills. We just happen to be very selective about who gets to see those social skills. People often view us as distant, rude and mysterious characters, and that’s definitely how we’re portrayed in movies. Ironically, everyone seems enchanted by fictional INTJs, but in real life, we’re pretty invisible, mostly because INTJs are featured in fiction, whereas the opposite is true of life. Nobody is there with a camera highlighting us, and so we fade into the periphery. 

INTJs naturally make a lot of enemies because while we understand other people quite well, they don’t make an effort to understand us.

As proof of how well we understand people –everyone in my family (parents included) comes to me for advice on how to get along with the others in the family. They ask me questions about their communication styles and their heart’s deepest desires because they know that I understand how each person’s brain works.

INTJs naturally analyze other people’s behaviour (not necessarily in a bad way). We watch what you do and you say, and we use that knowledge to logically deduce the workings of your brain. It is this that allows me to know when people are lying, when people are hurting and when they are happy –all without ever asking them or anyone they know.

This is another reason that we don’t have many friends –because we don’t need to ask questions to know who you are. We draw logical conclusions from hearing you speak and from observing your actions, but because we aren’t always good at asking social questions, people naturally assume that we aren’t interested in them and as a result, most seeds don’t grow into friendships.

We are terrible at expressing our own feelings.

While we may understand other people very astutely, I cannot adequately express to you how hard it can be to reveal true feelings to others. Often times INTJs are viewed as very robotic because of how vastly bad we are at this, but deep down we experience emotions just like everyone else. The difference between us and your average person is that we fight against our emotions –whether it be anger, fear, happiness or love. We fight against any form of emotion, even when we don’t want to.

But even despite all of our fighting, there are times when we genuinely want other people to understand how we feel. The problem is, we’ve grown so accustomed to fighting against our feelings that when we try to expose them to others, it always comes out wrong.

People end up misinterpreting our intentions because we just honestly have no clue how to show, let alone tell what we feel.

We are often strict non-conformists.

Nikola Tesla once described his personality with these words: “Anti-social behaviour is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.”

It’s easy to deduce from that fact that we comprise only 1-2% of the world population. We are different from the majority. The very fact that we don’t care what other people think of us lends to our lack of conformity.

Our logical side makes us stop before we break the rules and read them thoroughly. We want to understand the norms that we are breaking and yet conversely don’t actually care what people will think of us for doing so. It is simply that we wish to have a good reason for breaking the rules prior to doing so.

Interestingly enough, I think that most INTJs actually pride themselves in being nonconformists, though not purely for nonconformity’s sake alone (i.e. mature INTJs don’t do X just to be different,;we just don’t care that it’s different). We love to think outside the box, and we’re comfortable being different than everyone else. Often, it’s where we feel most at home, and we often hide our good qualities because we don’t care whether people think well of us. And if I’m being completely honest, we like to have secrets, things are just for ourselves, which is why you occasionally find out years down the road that your INTJ friend has a secret hobby that they didn’t tell you about.

We quickly recognize underlying patterns that nobody else does. 

While you’re still running around looking for clues, we often already have the answer, but deliberately don’t say it out loud just because we find it satisfying to keep secrets. Consider once again, Sherlock Holmes and his ability to solve cases long before the police even piece together the clues and notice how often he refuses to spill information about these cases to anyone else, even after he’s known the answers for a very long time.

The reason that we’re able to recognize patterns so quickly is that we typically look at both the big picture and the small picture. We analyze the little details while never forgetting how it relates to the overall problem. Meanwhile, we also make sure to compare our big picture to millions of completely unrelated variables, which eventually leads us to make connections that to anyone else might seem impossible.