How could you love someone when you don’t know them. Well, you could, though I’d say it’s either infatuation or loving an idea of the person rather than the actual person.

So that’s how love goes when it comes to interpersonal relationship. But how about your relationship with yourself? How do you love yourself? It is easy to self blame or to let inner critics run amok when you are facing difficulties in life while you are also struggling in practicing self love.

Understanding your personality helps you to understand your own nature and tendencies to respond in such a way when encountering different situations. By understanding this, you would be able to accept yourself without resorting to the critical self when you seemed to behave differently than the other person, which doesn’t mean either you or the other person is wrong. On the other hand, it also gives you insights on your strengths and weaknesses, which you could develop further or simply accept the way it is.

There’s one website, namely Your Personality, which is an online survey website for a scientific research about attachment theory. Although the focus of the study is for researching personalities in relation to interpersonal attachment, this survey site also offers you personality test results in multiple dimensions, such as:

• Attachment style (traits) – The tendency of how secure someone in relationship with people close to them. In psychology, this tendency can be categorized into four: secure, preoccupied (anxious), dismissing (avoidant), and fearful (anxious-avoidant).
• Attachment style (states) – Similar to the above, but it’s presented in a different graph.
• Subjective well being – This tells you how happy someone with their life at the moemnt. It is subjective which means one can be wealthy and living a good life from the perspective of general public, yet the person is feeling miserable inside.
• Relationship functioning – This result is only offered if you choose “in relationship” when you first fill in the questionnaire. The graph shows how far you are in commitment, satisfaction, alternative, and involvement with your romantic partner.
• Personality traits – These shows personality traits which are measured using the OCEAN or Big Five scale, consisting of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
• Narcissism – It shows how narcissistic you are in a spectrum compared to all the test takers.

What’s interesting in this survey is that you are able to retake tests from time to time (for example, once a month), and the results are plotted into a graph. This allows you to track how your personality changes over time, and consider how your environment, life experiences, and goals could influence your personality.

For example, my openness metric is getting higher over time between the beginning and end of 2017. This is the period when I spent a lot of time intensively traveling around South East Asia.

Your Personality survey can be taken here.

If you are interested with the study by the researchers behind this website project, a summary of the research results can be read from their blog section.