Couples Have More in Common Than We Think’

Have you ever wondered why many couples have quite a few traits in common? The old saying that ‘opposites attract’ may not be entirely true. According to a recent study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, most partners actually seem to have quite a few similarities. From their drinking habits to their political leanings, many people turn out to be quite similar to their partners.

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Partners are very similar

The new study looked at an impressive array of research, some dating back more than a century. They examined no fewer than 130 different characteristics in millions of couples, ranging from political beliefs to age of first sexual experience and even drinking and drug use habits.

And guess what? For 82 to 89 percent of the characteristics examined, there is a good chance that partners are quite similar. Only in three percent of the traits studied do people tend to be with someone who exhibits the opposite trait. The study thus confirms what individual studies have been suggesting for decades: opposites do not attract .

How did they arrive at these findings? The team conducted both a meta-analysis of previous studies and analyzed their own original data. In the meta-analysis, they examined 22 traits in 199 studies with millions of male-female older couples, engaged couples, married couples or cohabiting couples. The oldest study in this analysis dates back to 1903. They also used data from the UK Biobank to analyze 133 characteristics of almost 80,000 couples in the United Kingdom. The meta-analysis found “no compelling evidence” that opposites attract on any trait.

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Some properties are more often the same

The research also shows that some traits showed a particularly strong correlation, such as political and religious beliefs, level of education and intelligence. For example, if we take a scale from 0 (no correlation) to 1 (couples always share the same trait), the correlation for political beliefs was about 0.58.

Characteristics related to drug and drink use also showed strong correlations, with heavy drinkers, smokers and abstainers often linked to people with similar habits. Traits such as height, weight, medical conditions and personality showed much lower, but still positive, correlations. Some less commonly studied characteristics, such as number of sexual partners and whether someone was breastfed as a child, also showed a small correlation.

Remarkably, there was little correlation with other traits, such as extraversion. It seems that extroverts can end up with other extroverts just as well as with introverted partners . “People have all these theories that extroverts like introverts, or that extroverts like other extroverts, but the fact is it’s like tossing a coin: extroverts are just as likely to end up with extroverts as with introverts,” says first author Tanya Horwitz of the University of Colorado Boulder .

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But what does this actually mean for you?

Well, it could mean there’s more going on in the world of love than we thought. Finding love and finding a partner may not be as random as you might think. These findings suggest that even in situations where you think you have free choice in your relationships, there may be invisible forces at work that you are not fully aware of. Some people are simply attracted to others who are similar based on the traits studied, while other couples become more and more similar over time .

These combinations of traits could possibly lead to genetic consequences in the future, the researchers think. For example, if short people are more likely to have offspring that are also short, this could result in more people at the extremes of the height scale in the next generation. This includes medical, psychiatric and other traits, according to Horowitz.

So, the next time you wonder why you have so much in common with your partner, remember that love may not be blind, but rather a matter of similarity. And who knows what other unknown forces are at play.

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