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Game, Set, Love Match? Compatibility isn’t about loving the same movies – it’s about having similar values and desires 
Clear-thinking couples don’t get married if they know or suspect they aren’t compatible. Yet a lot of folks fall in love and get hitched knowing they are different in more ways than not. As the saying goes, opposites attract. But do they stay together? Not necessarily. Research shows similarities keep couples together for the long-term, and there’s a science-based checklist of compatibility factors that are good predictors of marital happiness down the road. Marriage therapist Terri Orbuch, project director of the longest-running study of married couples ever conducted, bases her list of 10 factors on recent findings from her 25-year project involving more than 360 partners. The four most important compatibility factors are whether both want children and agree how to raise them; having similar spending and money-handling habits; being sexually compatible and desiring the same amount of physical affection; and being well-matched intellectually. Sharing religious and political beliefs, liking each other’s family and friends, having personal hygiene and habits the other can live with, considering each other good friends and being willing to try new things the other person enjoys also strengthen a marriage and increase its likelihood for success. Couples who have about half of those similarities at the onset are more likely to stay together, says Orbuch, author of “5 Simple Ways to Take Your Marriage from Good to Great” (Delacorte Press, 2009). “It’s not interests or pastimes you need to be compatible on,” Orbuch clarifies. “It doesn’t matter if he likes golf and she likes tennis, she likes romantic comedy and he likes horror. It’s not food preferences or movie preferences or anything like that. Those types of differences can spice up a relationship. “But what you do need to have in common are key life values, or attitudinal similarities – core beliefs and underlying attitudes.” Does that mean a passionate person can’t be happy with a prudish one, or a penny pincher should shy away from a spendthrift? “I know the rest of the world says differences in money and sex and parenting are deal breakers, but I don’t agree with that,” says Denver psychologist Pat Covalt, author of “What Smart Couples Know: The Secret to a Happy Relationship” (Amacom, 2007). “I have done couple’s therapy for 30 years, and I take the position that there is no issue that cannot be settled if couples really tune into the other person, think in terms of ‘we’ and find ways of talking about it.” However, the object of these discussions can’t be to change the other person, or the relationship might indeed falter or fail, she adds. While a habitual saver may think her way of handling money is right, or at least more defensible than a compulsive spender’s, she cannot expect the other person to make all the changes; she must also be willing to change, make allowances and compromise. “We get so caught up in trying to get our point across,” Covalt says. And poor communication, not differences, poses the greater threat to a relationship. The only issues that are almost sure to doom a relationship are geographic separation when neither is willing to move, or if one wants children and the other doesn’t, Covalt says. Otherwise, if there are such things as compatibility factors, they don’t center on issues so much as openness and acceptance, she explains. “Look for signs that someone really listens. I don’t mean the person should be a weenie who gives in all the time, but they should try to understand your position,” Covalt says. “Run as fast as you can away from someone who always has to have their own way and who refuses to listen. The worst thing for a relationship is self-absorption.” Another issue that can cause an irreparable rift is when one person’s status as primary breadwinner is a cause of conflict or discomfort to one or both parties, says Dr. Scott Haltzman, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior, Brown University, Providence, R.I. Like Covalt, Haltzman believes flexibility is a better predictor of relationship success than a checklist of compatibilities. And, like Orbuch, he differentiates between being compatible and being the same, defining the former as “the ability to feel comfortable in each other’s company and space.” Setting core values aside, Haltzman says people with fundamentally different temperaments may be compatible for that very reason. “It could be that one person likes to talk and the other person is content to listen,” he says, “and that makes them compatible even though they’re not the same.” |
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