Melancholic personality or melancholy personality is one of the four fundamental types of personality. According to a proto-psychological theory, the four fundamental personality types are sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Sanguine personality is marked by sociable skills and pleasure seeking attitude, choleric personality is marked by ambition and leadership, melancholic personality is marked by analytical mind and calmness and phlegmatic personality is marked by peacefulness and a relaxed approach to life.
The term melancholy here doesn’t mean pensiveness or sadness. It actually is a type of personality that has many traits. Here are the common and some uncommon melancholy personality traits.
1. A melancholic person has a calm, quiet and patient personality. Men and women share the same melancholy personality traits. They would appear to be very soft, often silent even in crowded places or situations where there is frantic activity. There is a certain degree of contentment that is apparent in their demeanor. They are extremely patient and they have a very harmless approach towards life.
2. A melancholic person is an ideal member of the society as it has been for centuries. A melancholic man or woman loves societal order, hierarchy, family, friends and relatives and is comfortable with the role that he or she has in the larger scheme of things. Such a person will find comfort in the fact that there is social order, everyone has a role and he or she has a set of certain rights and duties. He or she would be very family-loving, will take care of the near and dear ones, will attend to all the duties that have been allotted to them and cater to everything that is considered to be an expectation. They would never get bored with the mundane humdrum of life as they find peace in that very same approach towards life.
3. A melancholic person has a penchant for details. Such people are very good with remembering things which could be the birthdays of friends, names of people they have met or just an odd detail in a spreadsheet. They will focus on everything around them that needs their attention and they would remember them. The power of recapitulation is the most potent in melancholy personality among other fundamental personality types.
4. A melancholic person is perfectly at ease with routines. They don’t like surprises. Anything that is sporadic or threatens to ruin their plans or schedules will make them uncomfortable. They find peace when they know there is social order, certain laws, hierarchies and that they have to do their bit. They don’t see families or friends, social commitments or even routines as a lack of option, luxury of time or dearth of flexibility. They don’t feel held back or chained down with the various relations and commitments of societal lives. They would not like a life to be lead in any other way. These melancholy personality traits make such people effective employees, great family heads, dutiful spouses, helpful friends and very cordial members of the society.
5. Their penchant for order makes them honest taxpaying citizens and they are averse to everything that challenges the social order which makes them quite righteous. However, there are exceptions because people don’t have only one type of personality. Almost every human being has a clubbed personality which can be broken down to many fundamentals and thus it is not accurate to state that every person with a melancholic personality is good and can never do anything that is bad.
6. People with melancholy personality traits will have a desire to be accurate. They like clearly defined goals and a very well planned route to accomplish that. They like straightforward plans that don’t have much conniving. They would stick to that plan, do everything accurately as is expected of them and then they would want to succeed in a desired timeframe. They are not in any haste to become billionaires and they don’t indulge in the rat races of rivalry. However, they do have a penchant for commitments which makes them very efficient. Melancholic people won’t keep missing deadlines or be absent from work, fail commitments or be completely aloof from the things that matter in personal, social and professional life.
7. There are many negative melancholy personality traits as well. They can more often than not be dogmatic. They may be too stubborn and they may be completely closed to new ideas. Since they stick to the rules and enjoy the traditional approaches which have been in place for a while, hence orthodoxies, they may not be open to any major changes. They may not change over time, either their own lives or the lives of their near and dear ones. Such melancholy personality traits and their variants work against the best interest of the melancholic people and the world.