Notes from a 75-Year-Old
Sometime back in the haze of the late ’90s—don’t ask me the exact date—Helen Palmer invited me to her house to be videotaped as an Enneagram Type Eight. She was filming a series on relationships, and apparently, I was meant to embody the Eight in all its glory. I have no memory of what I said. Still, I’m confident it was vintage Eight: intense, candid, probably a bit too sure of itself—certainly, healthy doses of arrogance and grandiosity.
I’ve been married four times. That should tell you something right there—about love, about learning, and about the long and winding road of becoming. Fifteen years with a woman who deserves sainthood for living with a difficult Enneagram type eight. Eighteen months with the wife from hell (both of us would agree). Sixteen years with a Four, which was more like a pilgrimage into the depths of my heart. And now, eight years with someone I have no interest in typing—because, frankly, I’m too busy laughing, being surprised, and dancing in the uncharted joy and simplicity of not knowing.
Typing and Trapping
People often ask, ‘What types go well together?’ Who should an Eight be with? And every time I hear that, I grit my teeth. Because love is not a compatibility quiz, it’s not an equation, and it’s certainly not something that a typology chart can sort. There’s value in the Enneagram, yes, but only if it deepens our capacity to show up—not if it becomes another excuse to avoid the raw, unfiltered mess of human connection.
I recall attending a Diamond Approach® summer retreat where someone stood up during Q&A and mentioned to A.H. Almaas how wonderful it was when both people in a relationship were “in the Work,” because all the issues that arise could be worked through. Hameed paused, smiled gently, and said something like, “I’ve never thought of it that way. I’ve always thought of a relationship as a place to enjoy the fruit of the Work.”
That landed hard. It flipped something in me. Relationship isn’t meant to be a constant excavation site. It’s not a shared project at a construction site. It’s where joy, appreciation, gratitude, compassion, real strength & will, and vulnerability & transparency show up. The laughter. The ripeness. The intimacy that doesn’t need fixing. If we’re not careful, we’ll turn love into a workshop—and the beloved into a mirror for our next issue.
If I had typed my current partner early on, I might have missed her altogether. She doesn’t fit my “type.” She fits my life. There’s a big difference.
What I’ve Learned (So Far)
Two truths have emerged, not just from the marriages, but from the decades of living in this Eight skin and letting it soften:
- There is only one heart. We speak of my heart, your heart, but there’s just HEART—one great field of sensitivity, feeling, connection, and knowing that moves through all of us. When I truly meet another person, it’s not “my Eight heart” meeting “their Four heart” or Six fear or Nine peace—it’s heart dancing with itself, love swooning into and out of love, like a sparrow in the sky. Everything else is personality static.
- My heart is a compass. And like all good compasses, it always points true north—toward what’s real. But the ego? It’s like a magnet messing with the needle. Pride, defense, strategies, expectations—they distort the signal. When I ignore those distortions and let the compass recalibrate, I find my way back. Always. Back to the real. Back to love.
Relating Isn’t a Science Project
If you’re trying to use the Enneagram to find the perfect partner, be careful. You might miss the whole point of relating. Love doesn’t follow charts or match subtypes. It unfolds. It deepens. It surprises. It burns and remakes you.
Relating—authentic, alive relating—isn’t a compatibility formula. It’s the long and winding road of becoming. Becoming vulnerable. Becoming available. Becoming more of what you are, your essence, and less of who you thought you had to be.
My Type Eight instincts once led me to think I had to take charge of love, master it, and dominate it. Turns out, love doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t submit to control. It invites surrender. And the more I let go of typing and controlling and fixing, the more I can be with the mystery of the other.
Because underneath it all—beneath the fire, the armor, the marriages, the tenderness, the type—was something much simpler and more sacred: the journey of my heart, the exploration and struggle with relating, turned out to be nothing more than the quest for intimacy with the Beloved.
Not the one across the table. The one within it.
Not the other. The Real.
Not a personality match. A holy meeting.
And maybe, after all these years, what I’ve been learning isn’t how to relate…
But how to live under the influence of love.
(If you like rock and blues.)
This is not a book of advice. It’s not a book about finding love. It is about being found by love. Love comes when there is nothing left in us to keep it away.
John Harper (Type 8) is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.
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