For some personality styles, maturity helps in recognizing a good match.

Joan changed her identity with a single tweet, the day she became Siobhan.  Oh, she liked the sound of that: Shi-VAWN!

As she typed her new name on Twitter,  she understood that in 140 characters she had taken a leap into endless personal possibilities. Her given name had kept her stuck to the earth, like mud. No wonder she’d been depressed.

No more! Now the 24-year-old Siobhan announced ecstatically to the world that she was ready for liftoff. Within a day she decided to leave her job and become a bartender.

Joan loses her way

It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded.  Siobhan was Gaelic for Joan, not that most people would know that. And secondly, she was hating her mindless job writing public relations releases for a small environmental nonprofit.  She’d loved it in the beginning, after her very handsome boss recruited her at a college alumni job fair.

She’d been so impressed with him–his demeanor, his commitment to their environmental cause, his respect for her work as she grew into it.

Then one day he leaned over her to see what she was writing on her computer.  His breath smelled truly awful. What a turnoff. In the weeks that followed, she began to see that all his supposedly perfect traits were figments of her imagination. She realized she didn’t really like this job.

She wished she’d gone to graduate school, but to study what? She’d lost her momentum.  She was really bummed. What was she going to do with her life?

Siobhan finds a new identity

Mixology! And off she went to bartender school, then to jobs at awesome bars. In the beginning, she had to be careful about her own drinking.  Imbibing and serving, definitely not a good combination.  She got sacked from a very elegant club after just a few months.  She was good at the work, though, once she’d conquered her own appetites.

Siobhan earned a reputation as a creative cocktail inventor and surprisingly organized barkeep. LGBTQ hangouts turned out to be the best places to work. Not that she was gay.  Or put it this way: she’d never really explored the full range of her sexuality. Gay, straight–these terms didn’t really mean anything.  That much she understood when she connected with Adriana, the owner of the club where she’d been working just a few weeks.

Siobhan ended up becoming a full partner in Adriana’s business and her life. Not only could Siobhan mix the best cocktails in town.  She also had a flair for social-media marketing.  She and Adriana did not stay together all that long, personally or in business. After a couple of years, Siobhan fell–and it felt like a literal, crashing fall–out of love. She was so down and drinking so much that she even had to give up bartending.

Maturity leads to a steadier match

By this time she was well in her thirties and feeling old.  Maybe it was time to pull herself together.  With money she’d saved, she bought a small bar in a seasonal beach town.  She hired a bartender named Geoff, got pregnant and married him. Then bought a bar in a year-round resort community in the mountains.  She had another child, took up singing, then teaching dance.  She is still married to Geoff and co-managing their business after six years.

It’s been rocky a lot of the time, frankly, given her emotional highs and lows.   But Geoff’s spiritual side steadies her. He’s into Gurdjieff, which is how she learned mystic dancing.

Geoff’s name is actually Jeff. He’s fine with Siobhan’s preferred spelling.

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Making the most of Mercurial personality style

Siobhan’s relationships before Geoff had been the I-love-you-intensely/I-hate-you-completely storms of passion common to Mercurial individuals.   Highly creative, open to anything, self-driven and ready to embrace something new without much contemplation, she was talented in many areas but not aimed in any one life direction.  But as she matured, she began to seek more permanence, a steadier base in life from which to operate.  Her instincts proved right in terms of work and love.  A bar in a resort community provided the endless stream of new people to dazzle and be dazzled by.  A child, then two, tethered her to needs of others.

Two unusual people create a challenging life

In Geoff, she found someone whose identity was not tied up in hers.  Highly Idiosyncratic, his ideas and spirituality sustained him, and his Conscientious qualities enabled him carry on a sufficiently productive life.   Siobhan was exciting and different and open to unusual ideas herself.  He marched to a different drummer and she couldn’t control him, which was good for both of them.  He is proving to be a good partner in their unusual life, as long as she doesn’t get too emotionally demanding.  That’s the challenge for them.