#She literally found someone to match her energy one-to-one nikifold is the exact same type

[enneamage]

could you do an enneagram about nikibur? 🙏 I know this relationship was bad and I'm glad Niki is better now, but I'd like to know about them, their problems.

I can give my Spicy Opinion based on what I’ve deliberated about their personalities, but truth be told the two of them are further from their textbook descriptions. Wilbur is less reliable than a healthy three, and Niki has a difficult history that gives her certain reflexes on top of her predisposition. There’s also things that will probably be too specific to guess that happened behind the scenes, but I’m willing to bet that Wilbur’s push-and-pull problems became a big issue between them.

(I will do a writeup in an ask later about how Wilbur collects Nines like stickers, but that’s slightly less relevant here because of the way they met.)

I think they fucked up, together.

The blame shifts to Wilbur as time goes on, but through naivety and badly calibrated strategic thinking, they introduced the stressor of being a public couple who made their content about being a public couple. They knew what their gimmick was, and they both invoked it from the get-go—they would flirt on stream, farm awws, and then play coy when people asked about the obvious. They wanted to do the will-they-won’t-they bit and were in open competition with Carson & Kate. I think people feel morally obligated to forget how blatant they were, but they were incredibly in-your-face, and they mostly did it on purpose. They were more than just a public couple: they were straight-baiting, and they held onto it for a while because it gave them content.

And then the cons outweighed the pros. People started buying exactly what they were selling, finding them cute and investing in their personal lives. The thing is, they weren’t actually prepared to be any more demonstrative than they already were, and they both have a private streak that they wanted to hide each other behind. In a way it was an innocent failure to understand what crowds are really like, and what happens when you give a mouse a cookie. They found that they couldn’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and at that point it was too late.

As an aside, women are competitive. They’re actually as competitive as men, but we treat the spite they treat other women with as anomalous because we think they’re supposed to be collectivistic or something. (People not noticing the double standard here is something that bothers me :P.) Needless to say, we usually don’t expect a female streamer to roll up and flirt with her Chad boyfriend without chat going nuts, because we know that people can be petty and jealous with the object of their affection. The same logic applies the other way around, but people tend to expect it less because women are meant to be more civilised or something. In the end we’re more equal than we know :P.

Niki doesn’t deserve the hate she got by any stretch of the imagination, but she got it all the same. She was heavily associated with Wilbur and had a personality people offhandedly summed up as ‘wholesome’ and ‘bland.’ She was endearing to some people, projected onto by others, and the object of vicious jealousy to (what I hope was?) a vocal minority. Not much active effort was put into seeing and understanding her as an individual, which has gotta be a mindfuck to go through, especially If you’re going through it virtually alone.

The on-paper ‘healthy’ love story between Threes and Nines is that Nines give Threes a space of unconditional and unjudgmental love. In return, Threes encourage Nines to develop themselves and shine on their own. The ideal is a feedback loop of mutual safety and encouragement, a very comfy duo. I won’t lie, I’ve seen this combination in the wild, they seem to happen more frequently than some other pairings and I can see why. This is also why I can only use the enneagram roadmap for them so much, because these two (or at least Wilbur) went off the rails.

Judging from what we’ve established about Wilbur so far, he’s good at making himself seem reliable, and then the payoff is so-so. To avoid being overly cruel I will say that Wilbur’s mental health was outstandingly bad at certain points in their timeline, so the situation has layers, but it probably activated some of his worst habits and Niki seems to have gotten the brunt of it. He liked being loved by her, and probably loving her back, but he didn’t have the mind to be her safe space consistently, which is a big part of what she needs out of a relationship.

Wilbur’s love interest persona is so distinct from the rest of him that it comes into question how real it is, and what the hell that even implies. The answers can range from ‘maybe he just gets inspired by the people he loves to behave differently’ to ‘American Psycho acting ass motherfucker.’ Threes can be a type that does romance, performs charm and builds fantasies about perfect love for them and their partner to live in. I think he pulled back when he was at his worst, maybe self-consciously hiding himself because he knew he wasn’t living up to his hype, maybe abandoning her when he wasn’t capable of meeting her needs. I don’t think he was entirely synthetic with her, because truth be told he’s not that good at lying for very long, but he did seem to make explicit and implicit promises that he went on to not keep. I remember the ”men are disappointing, actually” Niki clips, and I can tell who they’re about.

Some of the on-screen magnetism between Niki and Wilbur came from her being a cheerleader when he was feeling down. This is something that she elaborates on indirectly in her Dr. K video, she likes finding the places that she can slot into other people’s lives. Tragically for her, this is implicitly tied to the hope that they won’t leave her, which ended badly this time around. Wilbur was simple, in a way, just make the sad boy smile and make him feel better. Niki was on caretaker duty, which wouldn’t have been bad if he was able to match her energy and make things more reciprocal. Whether he was capable of returning her efforts in a way that wasn’t token or performative is up in the air, but in fairness, it looked like he had his moments.

Ultimately Wilbur couldn’t match Niki’s faithful, caring energy. Wilbur gets very self-absorbed in times of stress, and I’m actually kind of worried about what that looked like between them, because abandonment might have only been the tip of the iceberg.

I’m going to do something kind of rare and give Wilbur the benefit of the doubt on a few points. Wil, having a relatively functional sense of cause and effect, could probably put together that he was a big part of the problem whether he wanted to be or not. It was interactions with him and his audience that would wind up getting her attacked, so the simplest answer on that front was to just not do that. I also think he knew that their power gap was sketchy, and he might have been concerned about what it said about him. Ironically this might have caused him to hurt her more in the process as he was wrestling with it, but chat had her call him a nonce in their first date video, and in a roundabout way they had a point.