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She drives a Lexus, he rides a Harley; she's a sports nut, he's a bookworm; he's a Republican, she's a Democrat. Do opposites really attract? Is it good if they do?
It depends what you mean by "opposite." "I believe unresolved patterns attract," says Paul Cutright, author of You're Never Upset for the Reason You Think. Cutright, along with his wife Layne, run the Center for Enlightened Partnerships in Las Vegas. "What most people call falling in love is really falling in pattern," he says. "Relationships are about getting our own needs met, often on an unconscious basis. In other words, we try to find someone who is complementary to us and can help us learn, heal, and grow."
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July of 2003, researchers quizzed 978 heterosexual residents of Ithaca, New York, between the ages of 18 and 24. First, the participants rated the importance of 10 attributes of a long-term partner, and then rated themselves on the same scale. When the results were tallied, self-perception was more likely to match mate perception.
This conclusion was, "In Western society, humans use neither an 'opposites-attract' nor a 'reproductive-potentials-attract' rule in their choice of long-term partners, but rather a 'likes-attract' rule based on a preference for partners who are similar to themselves across a number of characteristics."
Those People Were Not Married, Though
"I don't really think opposites do attract," says William Ickes, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington and author of Empathic Accuracy. "But the study did not look at marital stability; these young people were not married. Reality is more complicated than that."
Someone once said, Ickes recalls, that if opposites didn't attract somewhat, everyone on the planet would be asexual or gay. "But you look for a complement, not someone identical," he says.
