What attracts us to choose our romantic life partners? A new comprehensive analysis suggests that we tend to favor certain common traits. Opposites don’t really attract, this is what a study has concluded.
The Familiar Wisdom: Opposites Don’t Really Attract
We’ve all heard the familiar wisdom that opposites attract when it comes to forming romantic partnerships. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder affirm that this familiar wisdom is often incorrect, based on the findings of their comprehensive study published in September in the journal “Nature Human Behavior.” The saying “birds of a feather flock together” is a more accurate summary of how we choose our partners.
The Study and Analysis
Horowitz and others conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies published in English that involved comparisons of the same or similar traits in partners, all published before August 17, 2022, with the earliest dating back to 1903. They excluded same-sex/gender partners, emphasizing that these partnerships warrant separate analysis as patterns can vary significantly. The comprehensive analysis focused on 22 distinct traits. The team also analyzed raw data for 133 additional traits based on the UK Biobank dataset, one of the largest and most detailed health information databases in the world with over 500,000 individuals. Overall, the study included millions of couples over a century: shared parents, engaged couples, married couples, and cohabiting couples.
Common Traits Among Couples
The comprehensive analysis and UK Biobank analysis revealed that the strongest correlations among couples were for birth year and traits such as political and religious attitudes, educational attainment, and some measures of intelligence. Couples also tend to resemble each other in substance use: heavy drinkers are likely to pair with other heavy drinkers, while abstainers tend to couple with other abstainers. There are few traits among UK Biobank couples where opposites seem to attract each other, particularly noting whether one is a morning or evening person, levels of anxiety, and hearing difficulties.
Conclusions and Caveats
Horowitz and others cautioned that even the strongest correlations they found were somewhat moderate. For why prominent couples resemble each other, the authors wrote that there are many potential reasons. Some people may simply be drawn to similar types, or couples may become more alike over time. Perhaps two people raised in the same geographic area or similar home environments naturally find themselves attracted to each other.
However, the researchers pointed out several limitations of their comprehensive analysis. Among the most important of these limitations is that most partners sampled were from Europe and the United States, with only a few partners from East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Moreover, all participants in the UK Biobank dataset were aged between 40 and 69 when originally recruited, and they all had lower likelihoods of smoking, social deprivation, or daily drinking. The studies included in the comprehensive analysis also varied significantly in terms of sample sizes used to draw correlations between traits. For these reasons, the researchers warn that their results “are unlikely to be generalizable to all human populations and time periods.”
Source: Nature Human Behavior, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01672-z
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