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People bring their own personal characteristics into relationships. Mate selection based on a partner's personality has been of particular interest and has led to conflicting psychological theories. In social psychology this is called the similarity-attraction effect (Newcomb 1956). This perspective suggests that individuals choose romantic partners with characteristics that are socially valued. For example, values like female beauty are important to males, while women tend to value social status in males. But in psychodynamic literature the focus is on how one's individual personality influences the choice of a partner with dissimilar personality traits. This is known as the complementarity perspective and relates closely to the phenomenon of “opposites attract.” Some support has been demonstrated for this concept in biology and sadomasochisitic relationships (Baumeister 1986; Buss 1985). A contrasting perspective on partner choice is that of similarity, which postulates that we are attracted to people with personality characteristics like our own (“Like begets like”). The aims of the current study were to test which of those two perspectives holds more true in partner choice, and how dyadic personality meshes are correlated with relationship satisfaction. We added relationship satisfaction as a variable, to see whether there were any gender differences in satisfaction when a partner had similar or dissimilar personality traits.
A heterogeneous sample of 28 couples currently in a romantic relationship participated in this study. The couples were undergraduate Adelphi University students and/or friends and family members. Participants were asked to provide demographic information and to complete a relationship satisfaction measure a measure—the Dyadic