Help me (7) improve my relationship with my friend (2)
I have a close friend whom I love dearly but sometimes struggle to connect with. The enneagram is the easiest way for me to conceptualize our differences because she is a very obvious 2 and I am a very obvious 7.
This person is genuinely lovely and makes me feel very comfortable and cared for but we just do not understand each other's orientation towards the world and we constantly end up in situations where one of us feels frustrated or misunderstood.
She thinks a lot about relationships, connection, emotions, mental health, trauma (she works in mental healthcare), family, helping people etc and her conversational style flips between sharing her feelings, telling stories about her life, and offering emotional support. I think a lot about how things work and why things are the way they are and what it would be like to be in some hypothetical situation. My conversational style is very much oriented towards sharing ideas or observations and discussing hypotheticals. We do both enjoy telling stories so that's one area in which we connect.
We frequently clash when I will share an idea and be met with what feels like an offer of emotional support, when what I'm looking for is someone to engage with my ideas and riff on them or offer their own ideas in return. I'm sure she often wants me to respond with emotions or emotional support but I don't. I don't think I have as much trouble identifying and talking about my feelings as some 7s but I don't really enjoy talking about them because I don't find it very interesting or engaging unless I'm in an emotionally charged situation where the feelings are very immediate. I sometimes feel a bit smothered by this dynamic where it's assumed that what I'm looking for is emotional support when I actually just want intellectual connection. I don't need someone hyping me up all the time and constantly telling me my feelings are valid and I'm awesome, I just want to have an interesting conversation.
My friend and I get along well when doing fun activities together or when we have something to talk about that involves relationships, people we both know, feelings, or mental health so I feel like when we do connect we're connecting in the 2 realm but we are almost never able to connect in the 7 realm. I guess maybe the fun activities part is in the 7 realm but I'm thinking about conversational/intellectual connection in the head center.
Are we just like fundamentally incompatible people? I really care about her and value our friendship, I just want to feel more understood and less frustrated lol.
Does anyone have any advice?