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We tend to look for people who are similar to us in certain ways.

Long-term couples are often similar in their moral values, education, and interests.

Personality similarity may matter less to relationship duration and quality than we think.

As a personality psychologist, I am occasionally approached for advice on how to build a new app or platform for bringing people together.

Once, it was students who wanted to create an app that would help people find friends on campus. Not necessarily romantic partners, but simply people you would like to go out with in the evening and have a good time. Their working assumption was that people should be similar in their personality traits to have fun and enjoy themselves.

I instantly thought about myself and one of my old friends, who used to be my preferred company when going out in the evening. Sure, we shared certain traits, such as empathy and a sense of humor, but we were exact opposites when it came to introversion and extraversion. What I enjoyed about spending time with them was that they were super outgoing, talking to everyone and easily making new friends, while I was more reserved and shy in such social situations. Me spending an evening with someone like me would work well in quiet, intimate settings but would be a total social disaster in more crowded and stimulating settings—quite likely, the two of us would end up awkwardly sitting in the corner and having a miserable time. With my friend, however, I could not only tag along in a busy pub, but some of their charm and social confidence seemed to rub off on me as well, and I became a lot more confident and outgoing too.

So what I tried to explain when talking to those students was that it is more than pure similarity in personality traits that makes people like each other and want to spend time together. As with friends, the same applies to romantic relationships. In fact, it is a well-replicated research finding that there is no association between similarity in couples’ personality traits and relationship satisfaction in romantic relationships (Leikas et al., 2018). But is there any similarity in couples’ personality traits to start with?

Do We Look for People Like Us?

Despite many outcries that dating apps are dying, about one-third of over 10,000 U.S. couples who got married in 2025 had met their partners through online dating sites or apps (The Knot Real Weddings Study 2026). What dating apps usually do is use complicated algorithms to match users by their interests, hobbies, attitudes, socio-economic status, and so on.

For quite a few dating apps, though, personality is central to matching. These apps offer their users a personality test and compatibility percentages with potential partners, some including only similarities but others include differences too. While it is, of course, impossible to know exactly how these personality-matching algorithms work, does matching people based on their personality traits make........

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