Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’
By the time I met Rich, I had whittled my list of must-haves for a romantic partner down to two: He must be Jewish, and he must have a permanent address.
He didn’t clear even this low bar. I’m not sure what made me fall for the Gentile giant who was crashing, as a “stopgap measure between things,” on the couch of my group house. But, reader, I married him.
This is not an uncommon trajectory. Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.”
Across many studies, people’s stated preferences don’t align well with the traits that incite their fondness for someone in real life. In a 2020 study, the UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick and his colleagues asked participants to list some ideal characteristics they wanted in a partner, and then sent them on a blind date. The researchers later asked the participants how closely the person they went out with had reflected both their own ideals and a list of someone else’s. People turned out to be just as romantically interested in a date who met the other person’s must-haves as they were in a date who met all of their own. “You are happy with somebody who fits your ideals,” Eastwick told me, “but you would have been just as happy with what your friend ordered off the menu.” This is where apps can fall short in terms of quality matchmaking. As Eastwick writes in his new book, Bonded by Evolution, compatibility can’t be determined by a dating profile; it has to be “curated, cultivated, and constructed”—usually as the relationship unfolds.
[Read: The doomed dream of an AI matchmaker]
Even some “deal-breakers” may not end up breaking the deal. In one study by Joel, researchers told subjects that a hypothetical romantic partner had a trait that they said they wanted to avoid—poor hygiene, say, or anger issues—and many people said that they would continue to date the prospect anyway. Joel said that this inclination would likely be even stronger “in the context of a real relationship, where there’s feelings involved.”
That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.)
Physical attraction matters, too—far more than most people realize, according to the researchers I spoke with. (Taylor Swift has it right when she sings, “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.”) If two people in a relationship are lucky, infatuation will set in: an obsessionlike mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them. Once that initial spark ignites, motivated reasoning—essentially, seeing what you want to see—takes over. Joel theorized that people are prone to a “progression bias” in relationships: They are more inclined to encourage a relationship to continue than they are to dissolve it. Merely spending time together makes people become more invested in making a relationship work. “Once you like someone,” Joel said, “you want to see the best in them.” After Rich and I started dating, I began to notice his sharp and twisted sense of humor. Once while impersonating an old person trying to use Twitter, he called tweets “a telegram about yourself.” Is this the funniest thing ever? Not really. But in my eyes, at that moment, it was.
This kind of self-delusion is a good thing. Everyone, to some extent, grades their romantic partner on a curve, and relationships in which partners are especially inclined to do this may be particularly strong. In one study that Eastwick cites in his book, the longest-lasting relationships were the ones in which people justified their partner’s faults with “yes, but” statements such as “She is messy, but I wouldn’t ask her to give up her free-spirited ways for anything.”
The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence. Do you like the guy from Tinder and the joke he cracked about The Big Lebowski just because you were in an unusually good mood on the day you met up with him? If you’d been in a rotten mood, would you have liked him (and his stupid joke) less? I’m not sure I would have given Rich a second glance if he had not walked by my room in the group house one day while I was listening to “Portions for Foxes,” by Rilo Kiley, and exclaimed, “This is one of my favorite songs ever.” No man had ever complimented my taste in music before. It felt so refreshing—and well, kinda hot.
[Read: The growing belief in ‘love at first sight’]
All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely. “You might have a middling first impression of somebody,” he said, “but then you meet them again, and you end up really liking them.” The apps, however, present so many options that if a date is “anywhere south of great,” people may be inclined to hastily decide “I’m not gonna do the second date.”
The better way to find love, Eastwick suggested, is to get to know romantic prospects in person, over time. “Compatibility,” he said, “is about what you’re able to create together.” He recommended building deep friendship networks—both because those friends can introduce you to singles they know and because some of them might become romantic partners. But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay). The person you spark with might be too tall or too short, or be a dog person to your cat person, or have an extremely boring job. Even so: They might be just your type.