Opposites may not actually attract when it comes to love as old theory debunked
Opposites may not actually attract when it comes to love and are very similar, according to a new study.
New evidence published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour has concluded partners, on average, share up to 89% of traits, including sharing the same religion and political leanings.
Jared Balbona, co-author of the paper and a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder Institute for Behaviour Genetics, told CNBC: “There are very few traits where opposites actually do attract."
Researchers collected data and analysed findings from 199 published papers, with some going back as far as 1903, and looked at 22 commonly studied traits among couples.
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The news study has collected data from millions of people (Getty Images)The data contained information on a staggering 8.5 million people across the world as they studied 133 traits from 80,000 volunteers from the UK.
The team then put their results on a scale that ranged from 1 to 0.5, with 1 being complete suitability with a partner and 0.5 indicating a non-convergence. All the couples were male-female.
"Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together," said first author Tanya Horwitz, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG).
In only 3% of traits, and only part of their analysis, did individuals partner with someone different than them. The research has important implications for the field of genetic research, according to experts.
"A lot of models in genetics assume that human mating is random. This study shows this assumption is probably wrong," said senior author and IBG Director Matt Keller. He said it is known as "assortative mating" when individuals with similar traits couple up.
Interestingly, traits around substance use showed a high correlation, with heavy smokers, heavy drinkers, and non-drinkers tending to partner up with those with similar habits. However, for some traits such as extroversion, there was not much of a correlation.
"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 Ms Horwitz.
Traits such as how many sexual partners a person had, or whether they had been breastfed as a child, showed some correlation. The trait for couples to be most similar was birth year.
"These findings suggest that even in situations where we feel like we have a choice about our relationships, there may be mechanisms happening behind the scenes of which we aren't fully aware," said Mr Horwitz.
The researchers said the correlations they found were fairly modest and hopefully spark more research across disciplines, from wealth to sociology and psychology.
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"We're hoping people can use this data to do their analyses and learn more about how and why people end up in the relationships they do," she concluded.
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