How to Seduce an INTJ

I don’t mean physically. I mean emotionally.

I am an INTJ – Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. Hannibal Lector is also an INTJ (I didn't have to look up that he was one. It was clear from the movie). You’re probably wondering why I bring him up, but I have good reasons.

In both the novel and the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice and Hannibal met, they play tit-for-tat – she tells him something, he tells her something.

The reason Hannibal did what he did is because all INTJs have a desire for knowledge. Taken to an extreme, it’s the sin of Greed. INTJs are emotionally satisfied by knowing things they want to know. But it has to be what they want to know. Gossip drives us insane.

In fact, when you start to see someone twitch angrily when someone else is running on and on, there is a good chance that person is an INTJ.

Hannibal wanted to know about Clarice, and when he got what he wanted from her, you saw the look of satisfaction on his face. Hannibal was manipulating Clarice into seducing him, while he was seducing her. It’s never a one-way street. When he got the chance, he caressed her finger with his.

Hannibal wanted intimate details from Clarice, and he had to play tit-for-tat to get them. But he got them. (There is a line from the movie, "You don't want Hannibal inside your head". You know what? You don't want any INTJ inside your head. Since we see patterns we can see things, that if we said them, would be incredibly cruel.)

INTJs are seduced by intimate emotional details – by stories of people’s lives. They don’t particularly judge what they hear. We’re too greedy to do much judging, because of our desire to understand.

You want to emotionally seduce an INTJ? Give him intimate details and stories of your life. Especially if you whisper in his ear in the dark

INTJs are almost invariably intelligent, knowledgeable, and witty. We are imaginative and intuitive first, after which reason is in the third place. If a male INTJ (I can’t speak about female ones) runs across a woman who is intelligent, witty and knowledgeable, she can easily seduce him with intimate details of her life – with stories about herself.

Intellect is not the first thing to get to us, although it does count tremendously. Engaging the imagination and the intuition does. The imagination is how we understand stories – it allows us to empathize, to feel a connection, The intuition helps the imagination.

That’s what counts with us – engaging the imagination and the emotions by intimate stories. We are in fact voyeurs -- not in the Peeping Tom sense, but in sense of wanting to know those unique stories about people's lives.

INTJs are also System Builders, i.e., they want to know the “whole” of something. When Hannibal was asking such intimate questions of Clarice, he was trying to find the most important things about her, so he would know her as a whole, as a complete system, as a whole woman.

In fact, in the second novel (but not the movie) they ended up together. I wasn’t surprised.

An INTJ will in fact start to consider such a woman his soul mate.

INTJs collect the unusual. Gossipy details about other’s lives do nothing for us,in fact, as I mentioned, drive us insane. But the unusual, the unique – that’s a different story, just as Clarice’s unusual life intrigued Hannibal.

For good or bad, INTJs are nearly impossible to read. Most people are vaguely confused by us. Oftentimes we're considered strange. It's just the way we are. We can't do much about it, although we do learn to halfway come across as normal.

The ENFP (Extroverted Feeling Perceiving) is supposed to be the natural partner of the INTJ. I have run across such women, and I know their effect on me. Some of them, the more intelligent and witty ones, do feel like my soul mates.

You can’t seduce an INTJ physically. Oh, you can, but that’s as far as it will go. A woman can be beatiful, and that will last about three days with us.

But once you can get to him emotionally, with the intimate, unusual stories, wit, intelligence, accepting the fact you’re dealing with someone who is less than one percent of the population…then you’ve found the chink in the armor.