Host: What is the tenth key value for compatibility?

Gloria MacDonald: The tenth value or trait is what we call Expressiveness. So, there are those people like me, who always need to be talking with their hands and they are very expressive and they might get very emotional. They might find that a movie or a book moves them to tears or maybe they laugh out loud very easily. They need to be expressing themselves potentially on a variety of different ways, sometimes verbally, but also very often, expressives need to have a lot more physical contact because they are expressing their love and they are caring about someone, through hugging or through kissing or through holding hands or through touching someone on the arm.

So very often people who are high on expressiveness are touchy and feely as well as being verbally expressive. Again, they tend to be higher on expressing emotions. So the person who is low on expressiveness is not going to be anywhere near as verbal and they probably, arent moved outwardly to laugh or to cry in any given situation. It doesnt mean that they dont have feelings and this is a huge area of misunderstanding. The expressive, the person who is high on expressive feels like the person who is low on expressive doesnt have feelings and that's not true.

Its just that the person who is low on expressiveness doesnt bring them out in the same way that a person who is high on expressiveness does. So again this can create huge problems around intimacy and understanding when you are trying to form an intimate relationship. The expressive is not going to understand why the non-expressive or the person who is lower on expressiveness can't communicate their feelings or doesnt want to communicate their feelings, because this is what the expressive is all about. So the expressive might need that physical touch, he might, he or she might need to hug and hold hands and if the non-expressive doesnt need that, over time the expressive is going to feel like their partner really doesnt love and cherish them, because they are not involved in that physical touch and the person who is low on expressiveness can very well feel like the person who is high on expressiveness is just constantly clean to them. Again, misunderstanding, because the person who is low on expressiveness may feel that the person who is high on expressiveness is just too needy around the area of physical touch.

The person who is low on expressiveness may feel that the person is just way too emotional and out of control because they are always crying and they are always being, they express their feelings of frustration and anger very easily and maybe very quickly and in a very visible or vocal way. The person who is low on the need for expressiveness would really feel that thats inappropriate, but thats not something you should be doing. You shouldnt be showing your emotions and your feelings to the whole world whereas the high expressive probably wears their heart on their sleeve and the lower expressive feels like thats something thats private.

Both have to really learn to respect one another and where they are coming from, but in a long term, intimate relationship, thats really difficult.