"You have no doubt heard “opposites attract” all throughout your life. It is a romantic notion; people who seem like natural enemies can be overtaken by a force neither party can withstand – love.
It’s a tantalizing fantasy: the princess being swept away by the rogue, the prince marrying the lowly farm girl, the uptight accountant falling for the rock star.
Despite the pleasant idea of polar opposites being pulled intangibly toward one another like biological magnets, the research suggests otherwise.
A 2008 study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology grabbed 476 women and 284 men from an online dating site and asked them what kind of person they would rather be with.
When asked if they would rather be with someone just like them or someone who complimented them with a nice set of opposing personality traits, 85 percent said they wanted an opposite – the fantasy.
They had these people fill out a personality test (one of those gigantic scientific ones, not the kind you take for fun on the Internet).
Those results were put aside and hidden, and then the subjects had to take another test where they were asked what sort of things they would like to see in a perfect mate.
The results?
People actually wanted someone just like them, even though they believed they wanted someone completely different.
Psychologists call this the “similarity-attraction hypothesis,” and this isn’t the only study which came to the same conclusion.
Psychologists call this the “similarity-attraction hypothesis,” and this isn’t the only study which came to the same conclusion.
According to a 2004 study by Lucas, Wendorf and Imamoglu, “In humans, the more similar couples are, the happier and more stable their relationships are.”
The Truth: When it comes to personality, you want someone a lot like you, and when opposites do attract the relationships often fall apart.
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