I Guess You’re Just Not My Type

Abstract

We examined the relevance of personality to relationship satisfaction in intimate couples from a typological point of view. Based on a sample of 133 couples, relationship satisfaction was predicted by the personality types of both relationship partners (each self-rated and partner-rated) resulting from the Big Five factors. Furthermore, interrater agreement of personality type and dyadic similarity were also used as predictors. The results showed that self-rated personality was hardly instrumental in predicting relationship satisfaction. For both sexes, relationship satisfaction seemed to depend mainly on how the person‘s personality was rated by his or her partner. Neither interrater agreement nor dyadic similarity had any influence on the relationship satisfaction of men or women. The applicability of the typological approach in this area of research is discussed.