The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay

Author:Meg Jay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: PSY039000, Developmental, Psychology, General
ISBN: 0446561762
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Eli and his girlfriend needed to be “in like.” By this I mean two things: being alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other. Each appreciates how the other acts and how he or she goes about the day, and this forestalls an incredible amount of friction. Two people who are similar are going to have the same reactions to a rainy day, a new car, a long vacation, an anniversary, a Sunday morning, and a big party.

We sometimes hear that opposites attract, and maybe they do for a hookup. More often, similarity is the essence of compatibility. Studies have repeatedly found that couples who are similar in areas such as socioeconomic status, education, age, ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, attitudes, values, and intelligence are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships and are less likely to seek divorce.

Finding someone like you might seem easy, but there is a twist—not just any similarity will do. Dating and married couples do tend to be similar to each other in attractiveness, age, education, political views, religion, and intelligence. So what about all those divorces out there? What about Eli and his girlfriend? The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call “deal breakers, not match makers.”

Deal breakers are your own personal sine qua non in relationships. They are qualities—almost always similarities—you feel are nonnegotiable. The absence of these similarities allows you to weed out people with whom you have fundamental differences. Maybe it is a deal breaker if someone is not Christian because you want to share spirituality and community. Perhaps you cannot imagine being with someone who is not intellectually curious because you value enriching conversation in your relationships. Sometimes people can even agree to disagree about very apparent, circumscribed differences, like Republican-Democrat couples who joke about their “mixed marriages.” Either way, people decide for themselves early on what their own deal breakers are, and, typically, we select partners accordingly. But these conspicuous similarities are not match makers. They may bring us together, but they don’t necessarily make us happy.

One match maker to consider is personality. Some research tells us that, especially in young couples, the more similar two people’s personalities are, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their relationship. Yet personality is how dating, and even married, couples tend to be least alike. The likely reason for this is, unlike deal breakers, personality is less obvious and not as easy to categorize. Personality is not about what we have done or even about what we like. It is about how we are in the world, and this infuses everything we do. Personality is the part of ourselves that we take everywhere, even to Nicaragua, so it is worth knowing something about.

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