westernu

That’s really hard to say. One of the limitations of the project is self-selection – we only looked at couples who are already together. We didn’t, say, pair people at random. If we had, we might have found much stronger partner effects. So, there may very well be plenty of people who you wouldn’t match well with, but those people are selected out by the time you enroll in our study.

What the results do suggest is that by the time you’re in a sufficiently established partnership to enroll in a research study together, your partner’s traits aren’t very important anymore.

Really, we need a lot more research on the early relationship stages—how do these relationship dynamics form in the first place?—to produce a satisfying answer to your question.

I think the biggest takeaway, to paraphrase my old friend and colleague Geoff MacDonald, is that the person you choose may not be as important as the relationship you build. As a culture, we put so much emphasis on choosing the right person. These results suggest that it’s really more important to be the right person. To create the conditions that will allow a relationship to flourish.

In terms of your point about evaluations, this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about myself. Can a relationship be objectively evaluated—are some partnerships inherently better than others--and if so, when do these objective criteria first come online? This is somewhere my students and I would really like to take our research next. We want to recruit couples in brand new relationships and study how they evaluate each other for compatibility and fit, and how those evaluations change as the relationship develops.

We were supposed to launch the study in March, but it got stalled due to COVID. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to open the lab up again, and I’ll have some more concrete answers for you.

That’s a great question. I think when it comes to relationship quality and longevity, there are a lot of chaotic processes at work that make long-term prediction difficult. Stressors and life events that come up, idiosyncratic experiences that you might happen to have with your partner, other people who may enter or exit your life and who give you different perspectives and ways of thinking about the partnership, etc.

So we can predict the aspects of the relationship that are stable, but they also change over time in unpredictable ways. I think that’s because the changes are largely driven by these kinds of environmental and contextual factors that are very difficult to measure, let alone predict.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of the findings, IMO – we did not find any evidence for any kind of partner matching predicting relationship quality.

The algorithm we were using detects interactions. So if my traits and preferences match with your traits and preferences to predict relationship quality, we should have picked up on that. For example, if Andrea says she likes extraverted guys, and she’s happy with Tom because he’s an extraverted guy, we should have found that putting Andrea’s desired extraversion and Tom’s own extraversion into the same model would have predicted more variance than either on its own. But that’s not what happens. Combining both partner’s variables didn’t predict more variance than just one partner’s variables. So that goes against the idea of matching, similarity, having a type, etc. If there was any matching going on, it didn’t predict how happy people were with their partners.

Insofar as our data can speak to this (which is debatable), I would say you want to look for a partner who seems genuinely interested in you, who is good at perspective-taking with you, and who seems to be responsive to your needs. Someone who makes you feel understood, validated, and cared for. If I was a betting person, I would bet on those things.