Related Resources • Personality Tools

Elsewhere on the Web • Questionnaire • History • Enhancing Relationships • Introduction

Many people believe that the Enneagram is a tool which can help you merge what's going on in your head with what you feel in your heart. When a couple's actions are guided by both their minds and their hearts, they could live their lives together with more values and meaning.

What is the Enneagram? It is an ancient tool from the Near East that helps describes nine different personality types so that you can understand your own uniqueness and that of your spouse.

Authors Robert and Linda Miles write in The New Marriage: Transcending the Happily-Ever-After Myth, "Individuals who discover their Enneagram personality types quickly discover invaluable information about their whole selves -- what motivates them, how they relate to themselves and to others, and how they deal with the vast array of circumstances they face in life."

Enneagram experts believe that knowing your own type can improve any relationship. Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson state that "Healthy relationships are about giving to another person gifts that come from the heart and express love." Before you can truly give of yourself to another in love, you must love yourself. To love yourself, you need to know who you are. The Enneagram can help you understand the way you relate to people and how your spouse likes to be treated.

Nine Personality Types

• 1 = Reformer
• 
  
• 2 = Helper
• 
  
• 3 = Motivator
• 
  
• 4 = Romantic
• 
  
• 5 = Thinker
• 
  
• 6 = Skeptic
• 
  
• 7 = Adventurer
• 
  
• 8 = Leader
• 
  
• 9 = Mediator

Think what an adventure a marriage could have when a romantic motivator marries a skeptic mediator!