Nurturer meets Collector or, Mia Farrow meets Clint Eastwood

Today's letter is N, and we're looking at a match between a Nurturer, Mia Farrow, and a Collector, Clint Eastwood.

The Nurturer is also the Matriarch, the Diva, the Guardian Angel or Fairy Godmother, the Nurse, the Cook, the Sidekick, the Mother and the Matchmaker. Usually, this is a female personality that is busy caring for the young, the sick, the helpless and elderly. She feels it’s her duty, but she also secretly hopes for special treatment for all of her self-sacrificing. This is the realm of stories and movies where parents protect keep their families together despite all odds. It’s also where you see magical mother figures (Guardian Angels, Fairy Godmothers) who use special powers to make life better.

If the story is about her, and in this case, because we’re focusing on the Matriarch, she will often be seen as amusing but also domineering. If she doesn’t have the love of a mate in her life, she’ll take power within the family instead. We’ll see her creating a home that meets her children’s needs despite her own problems—single parenting due to death, divorce or abandonment, health problems, financial hardships and other catastrophes. They will give their love freely without an agenda, without giving their families what they don’t want. In any story or movie focusing on this type, the Nurturer needs to be appreciated at some point for what she’s given of herself. Read more about Nurturers.

The Collector is a Salt of the Earth type—a person of the land. Collector types are as often male as female, and might be a farm hand, but not a farm owner. You would find Collector personalities in books or movies that are termed “heartwarming” or “inspirational” or “slice-of-life.” In these stories, a passive person discovers what he or she wants from life: Accidental Tourist, Shipping News. These personality types show us the richness of ordinary life: It’s a Wonderful Life.

These personality types are also common in Coming of Age stories: The Blue Lagoon; the Yearling; Fly Away Home; Where the Red Fern Grows. Themes involve healing and wholeness and morality tales about the price of passivity. The Collector is stubborn and doesn’t like change. If opposed, they will dig in their heels and defeat their opponent by sheer staying power. They can lose themselves in projects. As children, they were cooperative but could also be stubborn. In addition to the previously mentioned story themes or genres, you would find Collector types in fantasy, magical realism, fairytales.

Of all personality types, they need to “wake up” out of a fantasy world and into their real lives. It’s their tendency to stay simple like children, so as not to need to grapple with ambiguity and stress, to be unaware of one’s limitations, and what one is missing. It’s their destiny to wake up, feel the pain of limitation, and to go after what one wants in life. It’s too easy for the Collector personality to get stuck in comfortable routines, to their detriment. But often, life itself requires the Collector to wake up to the full responsibilities of adult reality. Read more about Collectors.   

What would a relationship between a Nurturer and a Collector be like?

They would get along well on many levels. Both love home and hearth, pets, nature. Both are optimistic, warm, kind, easy-going, undemanding, and people-oriented. Both are very considerate of others, and others enjoy being around their warm, loving hospitality. The Nurturer is the more outgoing of the two.

Both merge with other people’s agendas, and are able to take on their partner’s emotions, and are focused on fulfilling needs. They both do these things, but the motivations are different. She finds her identity by helping others. He finds his by being with someone who will give him a life and a reason for living. She’s happy to help him find a purpose. If she sees that he has it in him to excel in something, she’ll help him with it, and take great pride in his achievements.  

She’ll be attracted to his gentleness and that he allows her to be as affectionate as she wants to be.

Making decisions is hard for him, so if she gives him a deadline, and allows him to ruminate about it, he should be able to decide in the allotted time. Otherwise, he could sit on the fence forever.   

If the relationship were to go south, it might be because she’s become too indispensable, and he feels controlled. He’ll suspect that he is actually fulfilling her unrecognized needs, rather than his own, and will refuse further cooperation. Feeling abandoned by his lack of initiative, that will make her furious. But if things get so bad that she asks for her freedom, that will wake him up.

If she would but support his real needs, instead of her own unconscious, unmet needs through him, it would go a long way toward solving their problems. If he would go about doing what he needs to do to achieve his potential, instead of fighting with her over her unconscious, unmet needs, that would also help. And if she were to realize what her own needs were, rather than to live vicariously through him, that would be the icing on the cake. 

Additional Information:

What is the Enneagram, and What are Enneagram Personality Types?  

What are Instinctual Subtypes?  

Traits of the 27 Individual Subtypes  

Sources from which I collected and synthesized information about the matches