MBTI Type: ISFJ

Sam is living in a sea of his own personal experiences, and cannot climb out of them. When it’s too painful to move on from his wife’s death, his need is to move halfway across the States to a place where neither of them has ever made memories together—where he won’t “see her coming around that corner.” But once there, he does the same job as before as a sense of stability, through practicality. He struggles to learn how to do things on his own, without his wife’s influence, including raising his child. It takes him a long time to move toward altering his circumstances, and opening his mind to different possibilities, and even then, he seeks the same kind of relationship (a wife, marriage, a home). Though he tells the psychologist on the radio show he does not want to talk about his wife, he goes on and talks about her at length—about the pain of her loss, about how they met, about how his life seems meaningless without her, and the woman’s encouragement allows him to start to think he could find another soul mate or at least some happiness in his life. Sam asks a lot of questions of other people and worries about how “different” dating is now than before he was married. He dates as much for his son’s benefit as his own, and has a lot of soulful discussions with his son about what marriage means. He is emotional, but also determined just to survive and get through each day. Unlike his more intuitive son, he scoffs at the idea that this “Annie” person who wrote them a letter is “the one” and chooses the woman right in front of him, who thinks his jokes are funny instead. It’s only when his son gets on a plane without him and forces him to go to the Empire State Building that he’s open to meeting a stranger.

Enneagram: 6w5 sp/so

Sam is far more of a skeptic than his son, who believes in fate and destiny. He pokes fun at most of the women who send him love letters and proposals and doesn’t answer any of them or consider them a valid way to date; instead, he prefers to meet people face to face and get to know them that way. When he isn’t sure what to do, or how to date in the modern world, he turns to other people for encouragement, support, and “how to” guidelines, inferring that he needs outside support and guidance to feel good about entering the dating rat race again. This shows he’s approaching dating in a clinical way. He often tells jokes and self-deprecates to make people like him and lessen the tension, he is family-oriented and protective, and somewhat of a ‘traditional’ guy (he will pay for the meal). He’s also private, withdrawn, secretive, and doesn’t like to be forced to open up to people.