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    Two overlapping circles, one white and one gold, their shared lens filled with glass, and two lines spiralling up through it and crossing at gold points, set as a book cover: GROWING in Pairs, on a fair test of the catalyst pair, and how two people help each other grow

    Psychology

    Growing in Pairs

    On a fair test of the catalyst pair, and how two people help each other grow

    Typology · Relationships · Research

    Introduction

    In Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s novel Rough Strife a wife thinks back to the Michelangelo statues she and her husband saw in Florence when they first fell in love, figures hidden in the block and freed by chipping away everything that was not them. “She and Ivan were hammer and chisel to each other.”

    The Compass of the Mind made a claim about pairs like that. Two types form a catalyst pair when they lead with the same function in opposite attitudes and each one’s second function is the other’s third, as with the ENTJ and the ISTP. Each partner is strong exactly where the other is still learning. The essay ranked these pairs first on its spectrum, and said the same build raises the stakes both ways: more to gain, more to fight over.

    No one has tested any of this. This essay sets out what a fair test would look like, then what the research on couples already says about two people helping each other grow.

    What a fair test needs

    The first thing is getting the types right. A test taken once is not enough. In the publisher’s own data, about a third of people come back as a different type four weeks later. Each partner would sit a test built on the eight functions several times over several months, then go through a best-fit interview, and the person doing the typing should know nothing about the couple. A study that types its couples in the same practice that judges how well they fit has already decided its answer.

    The second is scoring the functions one by one. Four letters hide most of what the theory is about. The catalyst-pair idea is a claim about third functions, so the study has to measure third functions, the way the Singer-Loomis inventory scores each function and attitude on its own scale.

    The third is writing the predictions down before any data comes in. Here are two the theory makes.

    One is about growth. Over several years, each partner’s third function should develop faster in a catalyst pair than in a common-ground pair, because each lives with someone who uses it well every day. That needs couples followed for years, measured again and again. A snapshot cannot show it.

    The other is about spread. If the catalyst pair raises the stakes both ways, the theory predicts more than a better average. Its couples should be spread more widely, with more of the best outcomes and more of the worst. An average can hide that completely. Statisticians have models built for it: a mixed-effects location scale model, such as the one Philippe Rast and Emilio Ferrer set out for couples in 2018, estimates the spread of outcomes as well as their level, and lets one partner’s traits affect the other’s.

    The fourth is size. If the sixteen types were equally common, one couple in sixteen would be a catalyst pair by chance. To get a few hundred catalyst-pair couples a study would need several thousand couples in all. Samples that big exist. Dyrenforth and colleagues used national panels of 5,278, 6,554 and 11,418 people from Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany. What those panels lack is any measure of the functions.

    The fifth is separating the pairing from the people. The standard tool is David Kenny’s actor-partner interdependence model, which splits what my own traits do to my relationship from what my partner’s traits do to it, and leaves a third term for the fit between us. In Dyrenforth’s samples that third term, how alike the partners were, explained less than half a percent of satisfaction, while each person’s own traits explained about six percent. A catalyst-pair effect would have to show up in the fit term, after each partner’s maturity, attachment style and history have been measured and taken out.

    NoteWhat would count against it

    The idea fails if catalyst pairs do no better than common-ground pairs on average and are no more spread out either. It also fails if their third functions grow no faster than anyone else’s. A milder result would still teach something: if catalyst pairs are spread wider but no better on average, the double edge is real and the promise is not.

    There is a humbling result to keep in mind. When Samantha Joel and colleagues from 29 laboratories ran machine learning across 43 long-running couples studies in 2020, they could explain a fair share of how good a relationship was, but change over time was “largely unpredictable from any combination of self-report variables.” A type pairing would be one more self-report variable.

    How partners grow each other

    There is good evidence that partners shape each other, and it does not depend on type.

    Stephen Drigotas, Caryl Rusbult and their colleagues named it the Michelangelo phenomenon in 1999, after the same image as Schwartz’s novel. Across four studies, people whose partners saw them as their ideal self, and treated them that way, moved toward that ideal. The same perceived affirmation went with better functioning as a couple and with relationships that lasted. The authors were clear that it cuts both ways: “Some close partners bring out the best in each other, whereas others either fail to do so or bring out the worst in each other.” In a 2009 review Rusbult, Eli Finkel and Madoka Kumashiro summed up the model: close partners “sculpt one another’s selves,” helping or blocking each other’s goals.

    Arthur and Elaine Aron came at it from another side. In their self-expansion model, a relationship grows the self by taking in the other person’s skills, views and ways of seeing. In three experiments published in 2000, couples did a seven-minute task together that was either new and a little exciting or ordinary. Each time the new task raised the couples’ own ratings of their relationship more, and outside ratings of their videotaped conversations rose with it.

    Put the two together and the catalyst pair makes sense in their terms. Each partner’s second function is the other’s third, so each has, close at hand, a working model of the next thing they need to learn. The ISTP’s easy Se is a standing example for the ENTJ, and the ENTJ’s long-range Ni is one for the ISTP. What the research adds is how that example does its work. It works through affirmation, through seeing the other as who they are trying to become, and it can as easily go the other way.

    Living with the double edge

    Loops and grips cause much of the conflict in close relationships, whatever the two types are. What carries a couple through is maturity more than type. People further along in ego development can get on with nearly anyone, and they make their own chemistry instead of waiting to find it.

    So the practice is mostly about one’s own growth, with the partner as a model and not a crutch.

    PracticeLearning from the other's strength
    • Grow your own third function. Watching your partner use it well is a lesson, not a way of handing the job over. Leaning on the other’s strength feels like closeness and keeps you where you are.
    • Make room for first attempts. A third function in its early years is clumsy. An ENTJ trying to slow down and notice what is actually there will be bad at it before getting better.
    • Do new things together. The Arons’ couples got the lift from something new done side by side, not from talking about the relationship.
    • Affirm who the other is trying to become, not who you would prefer them to be. Rusbult’s sculptors free the figure that is already in the stone.
    PracticeWhen one of you is in a loop or a grip
    • Name a loop once, gently, and then leave it. A loop defends itself against argument, and the way out runs through the person’s own second function.
    • In a grip, don’t take it personally and don’t escalate. Keep in mind what the other person is like at their best.
    • Someone has to stay steady. When the other person can’t be the adult, you have to be.
    • Watch for feeding the indulgence. In a catalyst pair your strong second function is your partner’s third, and it can feed their loop as easily as it models the cure: your energy keeping an ENTJ busy, your certainty keeping an ISTP withdrawn.
    CaseAn ENTJ and an ISTP, ten years in

    An invented couple, to show how the same pairing can go two ways.

    In one version they are both working on themselves. She, the ENTJ, has learned from him to stop and look before she plans, and she plans better for it. He has learned from her to say where he is going before he goes, and finishes more of what he starts. They still argue about whose logic counts, and they have learned to enjoy it.

    In the other version neither has moved. She uses his appetite for action to stay busy and avoid every quiet question about her own life. He uses her certainty about the future as a reason to retreat into his own head. Each one’s strength keeps the other stuck, and their arguments about who is right have stopped being fun.

    The pairing is the same in both. The difference is the two people.

    That last point is the whole of it. A good pairing is a set of tools. Two people still have to pick them up.

    Works consulted

    • Aron, Arthur, and Elaine N. Aron. Love and the Expansion of Self: Understanding Attraction and Satisfaction. Washington: Hemisphere, 1986.
    • Aron, Arthur, Christina C. Norman, Elaine N. Aron, Colin McKenna and Richard E. Heyman. “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 2 (2000): 273 to 284.
    • Drigotas, Stephen M., Caryl E. Rusbult, Jennifer Wieselquist and Sarah W. Whitton. “Close Partner as Sculptor of the Ideal Self: Behavioral Affirmation and the Michelangelo Phenomenon.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 2 (1999): 293 to 323.
    • Dyrenforth, P. S., D. A. Kashy, M. B. Donnellan and R. E. Lucas. “Predicting Relationship and Life Satisfaction from Personality in Nationally Representative Samples from Three Countries: The Relative Importance of Actor, Partner, and Similarity Effects.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, no. 4 (2010): 690 to 702.
    • Joel, Samantha, Paul W. Eastwick and others. “Machine Learning Uncovers the Most Robust Self-Report Predictors of Relationship Quality across 43 Longitudinal Couples Studies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 32 (2020): 19061 to 19071.
    • Kenny, David A., Deborah A. Kashy and William L. Cook. Dyadic Data Analysis. New York: Guilford Press, 2006.
    • mbti-notes. Tumblr. Posts of 2 May 2020 and 3 February 2023.
    • Myers, Isabel Briggs, Mary H. McCaulley, Naomi L. Quenk and Allen L. Hammer. MBTI Manual, 3rd ed. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1998.
    • Rast, Philippe, and Emilio Ferrer. “A Mixed-Effects Location Scale Model for Dyadic Interactions.” Multivariate Behavioral Research 53, no. 5 (2018): 756 to 775.
    • Rusbult, Caryl E., Eli J. Finkel and Madoka Kumashiro. “The Michelangelo Phenomenon.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 6 (2009): 305 to 309.
    • Schwartz, Lynn Sharon. Rough Strife. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.