ENFJ Friendships

Mentors tend to be at the middle of things. This type knows a great many people, remembers what is happening in their lives, introduces them to each other, and is usually the one who organises whatever gets organised. Groups that would otherwise have drifted apart stay together because somebody kept making it happen, and that somebody is nearly always this type.

The cost of occupying that position is specific, and this type rarely names it.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

— Marcel Proust

What they give

Attention that is genuinely interested rather than dutiful.

A Mentor friend remembers the thing you were worried about and asks about it a month later. They notice you are quieter than usual before you have decided to mention anything. They connect you to the person you needed to meet, take your plans seriously enough to argue with the weak part, and turn up for the difficult thing without needing to be asked twice.

They are also, unusually among warm types, effective. Concern here comes with follow-through — the arrangement made, the awkward call taken on, the practical obstacle dealt with while nobody was watching. A Mentor’s friendship is a material thing rather than a sentiment.

And they hold groups together. This is genuinely undervalued: most friendship circles survive because one person keeps initiating, and when that person stops, the circle discovers within a year that it was never self-sustaining.

The asymmetry

Here is the problem, and it is structural rather than anyone’s fault.

A Mentor is the person others come to. That role is comfortable, familiar, and sincerely offered — and it means the traffic runs one way. Friends of this type are not selfish; they simply have no evidence that anything is needed, because this type is warm, capable and always fine.

Most Mentors have a version of this thought and dismiss it: if I stopped organising, would any of this continue? The honest answer is that some of it would not, and this type usually takes that as a comment on the friendships when it is mostly a comment on how the role was set up.

Being the person everyone relies on is not the same as being the person anyone checks on.

What gets someone genuinely close

Not shared history and not how much fun they are.

The people a Mentor is actually close to — as opposed to warm with, which is everyone — are the ones who ask a second question. Someone who noticed the asymmetry and corrected it, who does not accept I’m fine, who has at some point told this type something difficult about themselves and made it mutual.

That is a small number of people, usually two or three, and this type is disproportionately loyal to them for exactly this reason. If you have ever asked a Mentor how they actually are and waited through the first answer, you are probably closer to them than you realise.

Where it goes wrong

The friendship that is really a project. This type is drawn to people who need something, and the pull is strong enough to shape a whole social circle. A Mentor can end up with several friendships that consist of them supporting somebody through a rolling crisis, feel quietly used, feel guilty about feeling that, and raise none of it.

The unbalanced ledger. Because nothing is ever asked for, nothing is ever given, and the imbalance accumulates silently. It surfaces eventually as a disproportionate reaction to something small, or as a withdrawal that seems inexplicable to everyone else.

The managed disagreement. When a friendship hits real friction, this type smooths rather than addresses. The friendship survives, warmly, with a subject in it that can no longer be raised — and after enough of those the closeness is partly a performance.

The silent exit. The accumulation ends friendships here the way it ends everything else in this profile. A Mentor who has been quietly filing will one day stop initiating, and since they were the one who initiated, the friendship simply stops — with the other person never quite sure what happened.

What this type needs and will not request

Two things.

To be asked, and asked again. The first answer is always fine. This type will not volunteer a difficulty because they have spent their life being the person others bring difficulties to, and the role does not have an obvious reverse gear.

Friendships with no job in them. At least one relationship where nothing is being organised, developed or held together — where this type is not useful and is kept anyway. Mentors who have one describe it as the most restful thing in their life, and most do not have one.

If you are the friend

Ask twice, take the second answer. Organise something yourself occasionally, badly, so they do not have to. And tell them plainly when they are managing you — they will be embarrassed and grateful, and it is a thing almost nobody has ever said to them.

One thing to watch for this week: tell one friend something that is genuinely difficult for you, without a resolution attached. Notice the urge to reassure them about it as you say it.