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, so it is worth knowing something about.

While some Internet dating sites are nothing more than electronic bulletin boards for personals and photos, others purportedly assess your personality and pair you with similar others. These sorts of sites say they are more concerned with who you are than with what you want. This is good. The “what you want” questions bring us back to the deal breakers—hobbies, religion, politics, and other similarities that, while convenient, may not actually make us happy. The “who you are” questions are about profiling your personality. Some research suggests that couples who were matched through this sort of service tend to be happier than couples who meet in other ways, and if these matching sites are pairing people based on their personality profiles, then this makes some sense.

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Personality

Personality

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The Big Five

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The Big Five

You don’t need a fancy test to think about your personality or anyone else’s. One of the simplest and most widely researched models of personality is what is called the Big Five. The Big Five refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Just by reading about the Big Five and considering your own behavior, it is pretty easy to tell whether you fall on the high end or the low end, or somewhere in the middle, of the five dimensions.

The Big Five is not about what you like—it is about who you are, it is about how you live. The Big Five tells us how you wake up in the morning and how you go about doing most anything. It has to do with how you experience the world and, as a result, how others experience you. This is important because, when it comes to personality, wherever you go, there you are.

Consider that where we are on the Big Five is about 50 percent inherited. This means that you came into this world with roughly half of who you are already in place, because of genes, prenatal influences, and other biological factors. While you learn to interact with the world somewhat differently as experiences make their mark, personality remains relatively stable over time. Any parent can attest to the power of personality.

When you figure out your highs, mediums, and lows, you have a general profile of your personality, one that should describe your behavior across different situations and times. You can do the same for anyone that you know well, or are starting to know well, and this will bring into relief how similar—or dissimilar—your personalities are. There is no right or wrong personality, there is just your personality and how it fits with the personalities of other people. While it is not better or worse to be high or low or in the middle of the dimensions of the Big Five, it is often the case that we like or dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own.

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Sometimes the only thing wrong with another person is that he or she is a poor match for your own personality.

Eli and his girlfriend did not understand each other. They were fooled into thinking they were compatible because they had many plain-sight commonalities. They felt confused as their dissimilar personalities continually clashed. Not sure what to make of this, each hoped the other might change. Both imagined that they might become more similar the longer they were together, but the evidence for personality convergence over time is mixed.

Sometimes dating or married couples decide to split because things change—someone cheated or had to move—but, more often, people split up because things don’t change. It is far more common to hear couples say that, in retrospect, the differences were there all along.

When and if you commit, chances are that you will choose someone who is similar to you in ways that are convenient. But long-term relationships are inevitably inconvenient. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls them “the gateway to hard work” as they open the door to mortgages, children, and the like. Personality tells us something about how you and your partner will go about the good and bad days together.

Your Big Five won’t match exactly, of course, but the more similar your personalities, the smoother things may be. And for all of the ways you may not be like someone you love, by knowing something about his or her personality you have the opportunity to be more understanding about why he or she does the very different (or annoying) things that he or she does. That goes a long way toward bridging differences, and that’s important too.