Have you ever found yourself having the same romantic experiences again and again, even with different partners? Especially, when you deliberately make efforts to not repeat the same mistakes? Well, we might have an answer for you.
According to a study named Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people look for love and companionship with the same type of person.
Lead author of the study, Yoobin Park, said,
It’s common that when a relationship ends, people attribute the breakup to their ex-partner’s personality and decide they need to date a different type of person. Our research suggests there’s a strong tendency to nevertheless continue to date a similar personality.
Data collected from an ongoing multi-year study on couples and family, social psychologists at the University of Toronto came to this conclusion. The psychologists compared the personalities of current and past partners of 332 people and the results showed multiple prominent similarities between the partners.
Upon studying the partners, the experts also realised that the current partners described themselves in a similar fashion like the ones in the past had. Co-author of the study, Geoff Macdonald, said,
The degree of consistency from one relationship to the next suggests that people may indeed have a ‘type’. And though our data does not make it clear why people’s partners exhibit similar personalities, it is noteworthy that we found partner similarity above and beyond similarity to oneself.
Lead author Yoobin Park added,
Our study was particularly rigorous because we didn’t just rely on one person recalling their various partners’ personalities. We had reports from the partners themselves in real time.
The authors also claimed that the purpose of the study is to offer ways to people to fix and improve their romantic relationships. Park made a statement that even if a person is dating the same type of people, their past experiences should help them correcting errors they made before.
I’m definitely screwed.
