Whether it’s Jack and Rose in the Titanic, Danny and Sandy in Grease or the Disney classic Beauty and the Beast, we’ve been led to believe that opposites attract.
But analysis of more than 130 personality traits across millions of couples suggests the adage simply isn’t true.
‘Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together,’ said author Tanya Horwitz, from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Her team combined data from nearly 200 previous studies dating back to 1903 with their own current analysis.
They examined dozens of traits in couples including parents, those who were married, engaged pairs and partners who lived together.
Scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder found links between height, weight, medical conditions and personality traits in British couples (stock image)
Across both analysis they discovered traits like political and religious attitudes, level of education and certain measures of intelligence were strongly similar between couples.
Partners were also likely to share traits linked to substance use – with heavy smokers, heavy drinkers and teetotalers tending strongly to couple up with those who had similar habits.
There were also links between height, weight, medical conditions and personality traits between partners, they found.
The trait for which couples were most likely to be similar was, unsurprisingly, birth year.
From their analysis the team said there was ‘no compelling evidence’ on any trait that opposites attract.
Overall they discovered that for between 82 and 89 per cent of traits analysed, partners were more likely than not to be similar.
For only 3 per cent of traits, and only in one part of the analysis, did individuals tend to partner with those who were different than them.
These included chronotype – whether someone is a ‘morning lark’ or a ‘night owl’, tendency to worry and hearing difficulty.
This correlation was only small, they added.
Whether it’s Jack and Rose in the Titanic, Danny and Sandy in Grease or the Disney classic Beauty and the Beast (pictured), we’ve been led to believe that opposites attract.
‘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,’ Ms Horwitz said.
The team, whose research was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, said couples could share traits for a range of reasons.
Some people are attracted to people who are similar than them, while others grow more similar the longer they are together.
However there could be long-term consequences – for example if short people are more likely to have children with short people and tall people with tall people, there could be more height extremes in the next generation, they said.
Meanwhile people coupling up with those from a similar educational background could inadvertently be widening the socioeconomic divide.
If you’re dating someone who looks JUST like you then you’re in good company with celebs like Kristen Stewart and Courteney Cox
Rather than opposites attracting, studies have long shown that people are more inclined to date partners who resemble themselves.
Celebrities around the world are proving the notion – including blonde bombshells Oscar-nominated Kristen Stewart and her fiancée Dylan Meyer.
Meanwhile, Friends star Courteney Cox and her partner Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid are noted for their incredibly similar face shape and bone structure and piercing blue eyes.
But the phenomenon is not exclusive to the rich and famous – an Instagram page called @siblingsordating is dedicated to snaps of couples who appear eerily similar.
It may be that we are innately drawn to other people who look like us because seeing them sparks a feeling of familiarity or kinship.
Human rights lawyer Alexi Ashe and her husband comedian Seth Meyers attend the 2023 Met Gala in New York City
A study by Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, in Montpellier, France, in 2012 found that more than a third of men were most attracted to images of women that had been digitally manipulated to resemble their own features.
There’s also an idea that after years together, couples start to look increasingly alike, a theory backed up by a 1987 University of Michigan study that found that partners who didn’t look alike at the start of a marriage experience a ‘degree of convergence positively correlated with couples’ ratings of marriage quality’.
However, this idea has been debunked by a more recent study by Stanford University in 2020, published in Scientific Reports.
Researchers compiled a database of photos of more than 500 couples taken in the first two years of their marriage and anywhere between 20 and 69 years later.
They asked volunteers to examine a photo of an individual and six others, including their spouse, and rank them by similarity, as well as performing the same task using facial recognition software.
However, they found no evidence of couples morphing into each other with age, and came to the conclusion that spouses’ faces tended to be similar to begin with.
