The Value of the Instinctual Drives in Romantic Relationships
A Tool for Psychological and Relational Maturity
The Enneagram is a powerful system for personal transformation, but its potential for transforming dating, sexuality, and romantic relationships has largely been misunderstood or misapplied. Most relationship-oriented Enneagram teachings focus on type compatibility, but in my experience, there are no types more inherently compatible or incompatible.
In my view, the most practically useful and transformative dimension of the Enneagram for romantic relationships is not the nine types, but the Instinctual Drives. The best romantic relationships are vessels of mutual discovery, but when either erotic energy or relational attunement are unwelcome, mismatched, or misunderstood, a major part of self is lost. The Instinctual Drives and the Enneagram provide a roadmap for bringing all parts of self into intimate contact.
Human beings receive very little guidance in how to understand their own psychology, identify their needs accurately, or integrate body, heart, and mind. Much of adult identity is a patchwork of coping mechanisms and instinctual strategies, leaving deeper selfhood obscured.
Working with the Enneagram through the instinctual drives helps bring these forces into consciousness without pathologizing desire, moralizing attachment, or reducing relationships to technique.
Rather than asking partners to abandon parts of themselves, instinctual work supports the development of capacity, autonomy, and genuine intimacy from the inside out.
I work with individuals and couples who want to understand these dynamics more deeply and apply them in a grounded, psychologically precise way.
The instinctual drives move us beyond questions of “Are we compatible?” and toward far more meaningful questions:
How do I identify my own needs and orient to yours?
What forms of closeness, safety, and desire feel natural or foreign to me?
Where do I over-rely on one drive while neglecting others?
How do unconscious biological forces shape attraction, bonding, autonomy, and conflict?
Why Relationships Are the Crucible of the Instincts
Two of the three instinctual drives, the sexual and the social drives, are inherently relational. As a result, romantic relationships become one of the primary arenas where our instincts are activated, regulated, distorted, and revealed.
Romantic love carries extraordinary promise: to be seen, chosen, transformed, and met—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. However, this same openness exposes us to the possibility of profound loss and disorientation. Because our sense of identity first forms through being mirrored by caregivers, romantic love later becomes a gateway not only to deeply encounter another person, but to ourselves.
This is why romantic relationships surface our deepest psychological wounds and instinctual imbalances more powerfully than almost any other human experience.
Conflicting Narratives About Love and Attraction
Modern relationship culture is saturated with advice, strategies, and competing narratives:
That chemistry and passion are either everything or something to distrust
That attraction is a sign of unresolved wounds rather than genuine erotic potential
That stability and desire are fundamentally opposed, and that stability is inherently healthy
That one should either “find the spark” or simply choose someone workable and try harder
Men are often encouraged to reduce themselves to usefulness, performance, and provision, managing fear of rejection by turning relationships into transactions. Women are often encouraged to distrust passion and talk themselves out of desire in favor of steadiness and security. In both cases, large parts of the self are asked to go underground.
While it is true that unhealed wounds and unmet needs can distort attraction, these forces are not best handled by suppression or avoidance. They can be worked with, matured, and integrated rather than deferred until they resurface years later in deadened intimacy or quiet resentment.
The instinctual drives offer a way to do exactly that.
What the Instinctual Drives Are
In the Enneagram, the instincts are not subtypes, roles, or personality add-ons. They are biological motivational drives that organize attention, energy, and regulation:
Self-Preservation: the drive for physical well-being, vitality, and physical regulation
Sexual: the drive for attraction, intensity, and eliciting sexual choice through one’s unique “flavor” or erotic signature
Social: the drive for connection, belonging, and attuned relational context
Everyone has all three drives, but each person unconsciously prioritizes them differently early in life. One drive becomes dominant, one supportive, and one is comparatively neglected. This creates an Instinctual Stacking, an order of emotional and psychological priority for certain instinctual needs at the expense of other needs. This leads to six distinct Instinctual Types, which all have their own characteristic features, preferences, and gestalt:
Self-Preservation Dominant Stackings: SP/SO and SP/SX
Sexual Dominant Stackings: SX/SP and SX/SO
Social Dominant Stackings: SO/SX and SO/SP
The Instinctual Stackings are not particularly useful as measures of compatibility, but a map of what feels intuitive, what requires effort, and what tends to be overlooked and undervalued. Thus, two partners knowing their Instinctual Stacking in detail can help identify strengths and liabilities and make relationship work practical, understandable, and bridges self-understanding with understanding a beloved other.
Instinctual Stacking and the Blind Spot
The most important instinct in relationship work is often the third, neglected instinct which is called the blindspot.
This instinct is not absent. It is underdeveloped, undervalued, and poorly regulated. In romantic relationships, it often shows up as:
Chronic misunderstandings about needs
Repeating conflicts that never quite resolve
A sense that something essential is missing, but hard to name
Couples may struggle because of differences in instinctual priority, instinctual “illiteracy” with the partner’s blindspot, or because they share the same blindspot, unconsciously colluding in its avoidance.
Sexual Drive, Chemistry, and Erotic Discernment
One of the most misunderstood aspects of romantic relationships is sexual chemistry.
The sexual instinct is not synonymous with libido or sexual technique. It is a drive to elicit sexual choice and build sexual energy by expressing a distinct energetic, erotic signature that is often felt as a particular “scent,” tone, or vibration. This quality is not about mass appeal or conventional attractiveness. It is about:
Knowing and inhabiting one’s sexual flavor
Tolerating intensity without overraction or collapse
Relating to chemistry as a relational exchange, not merely a personal craving
Rather than dismissing attraction as pathology/unhealed wounds or blindly chasing it, instinctual work supports discernment: recognizing chemistry as a third force that emerges between people and learning how to regulate, deepen, and integrate it.
Balancing Safety, Connection, and Desire
Long-term relationships often falter when one instinctual preference dominates the relational dynamic:
Safety without vitality becomes constricting
Passion without regulation becomes destabilizing
Connection without individuation becomes engulfing
The instincts offer a way to embody intimacy as something dynamic instead of a static harmony.
A major but misunderstood instinctual problem is that the needs of the Sexual Drive and the Social Drive are at odds in many ways. Whereas the Social Drive seeks close connection, safe mutual regulation, and deep attunement, the Sexual Drive seeks sexual tension, mystery, and separation to get charged up.
Couples that become too enmeshed lose their erotic spark and often stagnate or fall apart while couples that are deeply erotically charged can become too unstable for real intimacy. Understanding the way these instincts operate and weave with one another is key for a fulfilling romantic relationship.
Erotic Polarity in Individuals and Couples
A central area where instinctual work becomes especially transformative, particularly for men, is in reconnecting with the body as a source of erotic energy, vitality, and agency. Eroticism does not come from doing things “the right way”. It comes from being in contact with one’s internal polarity and allowing that polarity to meet another’s.
Erotic polarity is not about gender stereotypes or sexual roles. It refers to the living relationship between complementary forces within a person that often represented as masculine and feminine energetic archetypes, not roles or fixed identities.
In healthy polarity:
There is a dynamic interplay between direction and receptivity
Between assertion and surrender
Between structure and flow
In individuals, restoring erotic polarity involves reclaiming disowned aspects of vitality, desire, vulnerability, or force which were often split off early in life for the sake of attachment or safety.
Instinctual work helps people of all sexual identities to the body to restores eroticism as a natural expression of self, not a strategy for securing connection, validation, or performing a role. Connecting more deeply to the instinctual drives in the body helps us to sense:
Where energy is held or blocked
How desire actually moves through them
How anger can be experienced as clarity and force rather than threat.
From an instinctual perspective, erotic energy and anger are closely related. Both arise from the same biological current of vitality, will, and energetic charge, but most people have a wounded relationship with their anger. When this current is denied conscious expression, desire flattens, attraction becomes effortful, and sexuality loses its charge.
Many men are encouraged, implicitly or explicitly, to manage themselves cognitively: to be controlled, useful, emotionally contained, and sexually competent rather than erotically alive. Over time, this can sever the connection between the body, desire, and identity. Erotic energy becomes reduced to performance, discharged, or compartmentalized altogether.
A parallel dynamic often appears for women, though it is shaped differently. Many women learn to separate their erotic energy from their embodied expression out of self-protection or to ward against shame. Sexual energy may be permitted only when it is pleasing, responsive, or contained within relational safety, or, in other cases, sexual energy can be used as a tool of false empowerment where it can be on display but similarly dissociated. Over time, this can split sexuality from power, leaving desire either muted or overly dependent on external affirmation.
Instinctual work is not just conceptual. It begins with deepening contact with the body and making sense of different sensations. This work helps people of all sexual identifies reclaim erotic energy as something that arises from the body itself, rooted in agency, sensation, and self-contact.
When polarity is alive, intimacy feels charged without being volatile, and stable without becoming inert. This work helps individuals and couples move beyond scripts and strategies toward a sexuality that is embodied, differentiated, and deeply personal.
I work with individuals and couples who want to understand these dynamics more deeply and apply them in a grounded, psychologically precise way.