Sorry, Couples: Study Says Opposites Don't Attract
They say that "opposites attract" — or at least Robert F. Winch said something like that in a 1954 study, in which he wrote that people look for romantic partners who have traits they lack.
It's the idea that introverts are attracted to extroverts, or that someone who's very neat might be attracted to someone messy.
These pairings happen in movies all the time — but do they happen in real life?
Probably not, says a recent study from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Researchers looked at 199 past studies going back as far as 1903, looking at 22 traits that might be shared between male-female pairings.
They also looked at 133 traits among almost 80,000 male-female couples in the UK Biobank, a health database started in 2006.
It was found that, for more than 80% of the traits looked at, partners were more likely to be similar than different.
Couples often had similar political and religious beliefs, as well as similar levels of education.
Heavy smokers were likely to pair up, as were heavy drinkers and those who didn't drink at all.
For just a few traits, opposites really did attract. For example, people who liked going to bed late were a little more likely to pair with people who liked waking up early.
However, whether people were introverts or extroverts did not seem to matter at all.
"People have all these theories that extroverts like introverts or extroverts like other extroverts, but the fact of the matter is that it's about like flipping a coin: extroverts are similarly likely to end up with extroverts as with introverts," said Tanya Horwitz, the study's first author.
However, the authors noted that there are many reasons why couples might share traits.
They could be attracted to people similar to themselves, but they might also have just grown up in the same area — or they could have become more similar to each other over time.
