Understanding The Three Kinds Of People

(Originally posted on 3-25-2011)

A long time ago my friend Adam and I came up with a way of categorizing the disparity between your first impression of someone and what you come to find out about them as you get to know them.

1.) The Balloon: A balloon is someone who you get an impression from when you meet them and as you get to know them you realize that everything about them directly stems from that initial impression. You are unlikely to be surprised by anything they do or say. Meeting them once is equivalent to knowing them for years and the rest is all just factual information.

2.) The Cupcake: A cupcake is someone who you get an initial impression of that is entirely correct but there is another layer to them that requires getting to know them to truly understand who they are ("licking off the frosting" so to speak). Some people make the mistake of taking a cupcake at face value and never learning who they really are which can lead to constant problems in a relationship.

3.) The Onion: An onion is someone who will give you an initial impression that might be correct and at least has seeds in truth but is actually the bare minimum of who they are. Often every new thing you learn about an onion person will be a surprise and may even contradict what you previously thought. Often these people are also hard to get to open up on top of everything else.

This system actually came from me trying to explain my attempt at friendship with Adam's girlfriend at the time and why she and Adam had this intrinsic incompatibility. She was a balloon, Adam was an onion and neither of them knew how to understand the other. Well, and Adam didn't care about her.

I am a cupcake and in spite of the fact that cupcake people are usually a lot easier to "figure out" than onion people, I have still had many friendships with problems in understanding related to my cupcakeness. Adam being an onion doesn't have as many problems because he just lets most people only see his "surface layers" and leaves it at that. I get frustrated if I have known people for years and they still don't fully understand me.