472. What ACTUALLY makes people compatible?

Is a 'spark' all that it takes to be compatible in the long-term? What about sharing the same interests, personality or sense of humour? Or is it something more deep and intangible? In today’s episode, we explore what ACTUALLY makes two people right for each other, and why the things that draw us together aren’t always the things that keep us together. Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s We discuss: Chemistry versus long-term compatibility Why shared values matter more than shared hobbies The importance of feeling understood, appreciated and responded to (i.e the Gottman's theory of responsiveness) How the belief in soulmates can shape your relationship The Four Horsemen that erode connection What an argument can reveal about your future together Whether you’re dating someone new or reflecting on a long-term relationship, this episode explores what it means to build a love that lasts, through change, conflict and the thousands of little choices we make along the way. Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:07Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.

• 1:27Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It's so great to have you here. As always, back for another episode as we break down the psychology of our 20s, at this stage, our 30s and beyond. Today, we are talking about the psychology of compatibility, and what makes people right for each other on a very, very fundamental level, on an emotional level. There is so much about dating and about falling in love that feels entirely up to chance. It is so rare to even meet somebody that you like and for them to like you back and to then create a relationship. And that comes with a great deal of vulnerability. So when all of

• 2:08Jemma Sbeg?

  that finally happens, I think we naturally, we naturally want to assume that just being with somebody must mean we're compatible. But after a while, sometimes like these little things come up that make us question if we really are. There is this initial level of compatibility, which is, you know, I like the same music, everything feels easy, we're attracted to each other. But then there's also a secondary, deeper level, which is, do we believe in the same things? Do we believe in the same good in the world? Are our values aligned? Do I want to be with this person? Do I want this person to be a present force in my life for 10, 5, 15, 50 years?

• 2:50Jemma Sbeg?

  I think a lot of compatibility is a lot less glamorous than what we make it to be. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of something else that people don't really speak about. So today, I want to just break down the literature on this. The past 30 years, researchers and psychologists have done so much, so much research and so much experimentation into what makes relationships last, what doesn't, what is the secret sauce amongst those who do. And so I want to summarize it all today and maybe help you out in whatever stage of a relationship you are in right now, whether you are currently looking and want to make a good choice, whether you feel like you've in fact found your soulmate and want to just validate that, or maybe if you have a few doubts,

• 3:35Jemma Sbeg?

  I think that this episode is going to provide every single person listening with something that they maybe don't know about how do people find each other and how do people make it work, and whether that is a choice or whether it is destiny. So without further ado, let's get into the psychology of compatibility.

• 3:58Jemma Sbeg?

  When we look at the psychology literature, as I was saying, on what makes people compatible, two categories emerge. There is the category of things which people think make people compatible, and which we often focus on excessively in the beginning. And then there is the category of less sexy things that actually make people want to be with each other in the long run. These are a lot less flashy. They're also harder to recognize. I think a lot of them reveal themselves over time. So the first meeting might not always give you the best indication of whether you and somebody else are going to last, maybe not even the 10th or the 15th date, maybe not even the second or the third year. Let's run through these separately, starting

• 4:42Jemma Sbeg?

  with the factors we think matter most. I would say this includes things like physical attraction, it includes the spark, and it also includes personality, which may come as a shock that personality doesn't matter as much as we think it does. But it actually doesn't. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more later on. But firstly, physical attraction. How much of whether two people make it comes down to thinking that somebody else is just hot? Very little. You could probably answer that for yourself, but very little. I remember doing a sex ed class when I was in high school, and we had like, I don't know if your sex ed did this, but we had the

• 5:24Jemma Sbeg?

  opportunity to ask our health teacher, like anonymous questions, using like a piece of paper and a pen, and he'd like pick it out of a bowl. And this was a middle-aged sports teacher. He was like a bona fide bachelor, and somebody asked him, what matters more, looks or personality? Which is a very earnest question to ask as a teenager. And I remember very distinctly him giving us the most straight answer any adult had probably ever given us. He was essentially like, I'm not going to lie to you, looks matter a lot. They matter a lot when you're young. They matter less as an adult. When you get to around the age of 30, values matter more. And I remember

• 6:06Jemma Sbeg?

  being like 16 and being like, well, that sucks. I've got a while to wait. But he was actually partially correct. When researchers ask people of different ages to rank what attributes are most important to them in a partner, in our 20s and 30s, physical attraction sits actually pretty high, near the top of the list. But the older we get, it falls continuously with each decade. And I think this represents a shift from external to like internal value and a change of priorities. Like somebody being hot or beautiful, that's great, but do you want to go into debt with this person? Do you want to endure the worst moments of your life with them? Do you want to hate them

• 6:50Jemma Sbeg?

  at times? I think that like, we see looks for what they really are, which is shallow, something that fades, and something that doesn't actually give an indicator of what comes underneath. Physical attraction is, is what we would call a dating motivator, but it's not relationship fuel. You know, the evolutionary theory is that we are more attracted to people we deem as having greater mating potential. That's what the theory says. We're more attracted to people who we think will produce healthier offspring. Nowadays, we know that that theory is very outdated, because people are attracted to all kinds of other people who probably wouldn't make a great

• 7:34Jemma Sbeg?

  parent, right? Like, there's all these other explanations now that seem to take precedent. What researchers now do suggest is that physical attraction is subjective, and it's based, yes, loosely on physical health and fitness, but it's really based on preferences, it's based on upbringing. And what it is inevitably is a hook that enables a spark to develop between people, or more so, it's something that like, gives people a basis to meet, and therefore to bond. It is, physical attraction is bait that's hopefully going to help you find something deeper about that person that you like. In fact, having an instantaneous, complete drug-like

• 8:16Jemma Sbeg?

  attraction to somebody may actually mean you avoid noticing fundamental differences that hurt you down the line. We all glamorize this idea of like, love at first sight, but studies show couples who experience highly passionate, fast-moving courtships, often called like Hollywood romances, actually tend to grow dissatisfied much quicker. And they face a higher statistical probability of divorcing within seven years of marrying, compared to those who didn't have that like, hot and heavy spark at the beginning, but did have a longer courtship, did seem to actually build chemistry over time. It also becomes easy.

• 8:57Jemma Sbeg?

  If you are only looking for attraction, to be infatuated by the idea of somebody else, and infatuated by the idea that somebody else likes you. To explain that a little bit better, there was a two thousand and nine study published in the Journal of Personality Psychology. And what it found was that people find others most attractive when there was evidence that they found them attractive first. So you can find somebody good looking, but the moment your friend or whoever says, hey, I think like they find you hot as well. That becomes a whole other motivational force. Your brain lights up exponentially, like a whole new section of you is like paying attention because suddenly there's a prospect there, suddenly like

• 9:39Jemma Sbeg?

  there is an additional level of validation that may be motivating you to pursue that person. It's also when maybe the shades kind of go down and we don't fully think like, wait a second, just because I find this person attractive, does that mean that I'm going to be able to actually build something with them? Have I, you know, before putting a label on this, even considered like long-term goals, long-term values, long-term considerations? So, physical attraction, whether you, obviously you want a degree of it, but is it the most important thing? Can we actually fall in love with somebody that we might not find immediately physically attractive at the beginning?

• 10:20Jemma Sbeg?

  Some of the research says yes, and also might be better for your judgment to not have your decision-making clouded by, oh my god, I wanna like sleep with this person, or like, oh my god, I can't believe I'm with somebody who's so far out of my league, and for it to become this kind of ego thing as well. So that's, that's compatibility through the lens of physical attraction. The second thing that matters a lot less for compatibility and is less obvious is personality. Often people are like, do you date for looks or do you date for personality? Turns out maybe we shouldn't date for either. I think we assume that the more things that we have in common, trait-wise, the stronger the time. This is, has a name, it's known as the similarity attraction hypothesis.

• 11:05Jemma Sbeg?

  And it essentially says that we are naturally drawn to people who we share certain hobbies, traits, personality traits especially with, typically because that means that we have more mutual enjoyment and less fundamental disagreements. That is what the theory says. That's a very clean, counterintuitive idea. Researchers are now showing us it's a lot more complicated than that, which is unfortunate for us. Nothing's ever easy, but it is, it's more complicated than that. Two thousand and four study looked at newlywed couples to see how similar they were on different characteristics. They were more likely to be the same age. They were more likely to share religious beliefs, political orientation.

• 11:46Jemma Sbeg?

  They were definitely more likely to be similar in terms of education and intelligence level. But when it came to personality specifically, sharing the exact same traits could actually sometimes become a bit grating, could be at your detriment. We obviously, like, we like being around people who are similar to us, but not identical. We are actually quite attracted to people who seem to expand us because of our differences and because they approach the world differently in their own way. This is partially known as the self-expansion model of relationships. It's one of the first psychological theories of love that we have. What it basically says is that we don't want someone who is our exact mirror. We want an expander.

• 12:31Jemma Sbeg?

  We want somebody who brings something different that then we can absorb into ourselves and become different in our own way. Personality in this study didn't fundamentally determine whether two people would last or not. You know, the average couple might have more in common than two people who aren't together, obviously. But when we try and link that to happiness, we fall short. It's not irrelevant, but if we look at these huge studies and examine tens of thousands of couples, again, the ones that make it don't seem to have identical personality attributes. What they do seem to have is similarity in something deeper, which is values.

• 13:14Jemma Sbeg?

  Values si- sit deeper than personality because, you know, personality may influence how you unconsciously react to your situation. Your values influence how you want to react or respond to a situation. How you want to plan for your future situations as well, future situations you may encounter. That kind of future planning is something that you involve a partner in. Immediate reactions driven by personality, probably not. This is where we get to the second list, what actually matters and makes people compatible. And it becomes exceedingly obvious that it's basically three things. One, as I said, values, the things that we choose to believe. Two, responsiveness. And three,

• 13:58Jemma Sbeg?

  your belief that love can be built, restored and chosen, rather than that love is simply destiny. Like, what makes people compatible is literally choice. Let's start with values. So there was a two thousand twenty-five study that showed one of the most clearest correlations between shared values, relationship satisfaction, and ultimately longer-lasting emotional intimacy. Shared values alone accounted for a fifty percent difference in whether a couple was satisfied with each other or not. Fifty percent, that is miles ahead of anything else. This is known as value congruence. And what they know is that you can form a life with somebody whose personality is a little bit different from yours.

• 14:42Jemma Sbeg?

  You cannot form a life with somebody who you fundamentally disagree with about how the world is, how they should treat others, what's important, and also how they see themselves. That is like the perfect equation for an argument. Specifically when we get to this thing about what is fundamentally important in life. Money or family, creativity or productivity, spontaneity or structure. You can be an introvert, they can be an extrovert, but if you don't solidify around the meaning of a good life, that's gonna be disastrous. This seems to matter especially

• 15:24Jemma Sbeg?

  if one person in the relationship has a very specific type of value system. This is called a benevolent value system. One of the biggest studies on this, or I should say, it was five studies, five studies on this ever conducted, was completed in twenty twenty-three and it was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In these studies, they had hundreds of participants rank fifty-seven of the most common human values. So generosity, productivity, kindness, all those things. And also how much they valued them in other people. They wanted to know not just if sharing values was important, but if it was certain values that had to be shared that were deal breakers.

• 16:04Jemma Sbeg?

  So there was, you know, fifty, let's say twenty-five values that like you could differ on and twenty-five you definitely couldn't. They found their answer. The specific set of values, as I said, that was the biggest indicator of romantic relationship quality were something called self-transcendence values, which is values to do with caring and feeling generous towards other people. When a couple equally valued that about themselves and saw that in their partner, saw that their partner valued that also, they weren't just the most compatible, they were also the happiest. Probably because, I would assume if they have that value set, they treat each other that way as well.

• 16:45Jemma Sbeg?

  What this shows me, and what I think we can learn from this, is that if you are someone who feels deeply, who thinks about the wellbeing of others, who has a sensitive heart, you need to be with somebody who is like that as well. That is a core compatibility value. Often we ignore this more like deeper intrinsic stuff for external signs of compatibility, like they're like the same movies, we have the same friends, we grew up in the same area. That's all nice, that's great, but if at the end of the day, like I said, like what we're really taking from this, if you don't value the same kind of good in the world that they do, it probably won't work. And I will say it goes the other way as well. What they found was that if your values centre around

• 17:27Jemma Sbeg?

  self-enhancement, so you are guided by a desireless drive and achieve, yeah, you're gonna struggle with somebody who doesn't have that drive because, again, your version of a good life is gonna be different. And it's not to say one version is better than the other, it's just different. What we're really talking about here is what the Gottman Institute, which is the leading institute on couples and love, calls the creation of shared meaning and the creation of a collaborative worldview. The most compatible couples, when you ask them, like, you know, what makes you happy? What would, what would a good life look like? Their answers are often aligned. I don't know if you saw this example, like I saw this video about this the other day, which was,

• 18:10Jemma Sbeg?

  if you ask somebody, well, if you said, I'm gonna give you a million dollars to go on a holiday together, but you have to agree on where you're gonna go, what, would you guys say the same things? Like, would you, would your idea of fun, would your idea of a good life, would your idea of retirement, for example, like be aligned? It's kind of a litmus test for how you're going to act in your day to day. As I said, this is an intrinsic factor. We don't always choose our values. We choose them partially, I will say, but they, they tend to emerge from our surroundings and our temperament. We don't give them much, much conscious thought, like what you value just seems to be something that you always have believed is right.

• 18:51Jemma Sbeg?

  But there are some, I would say, more emotional things that I would say there's other elements compatibility that we can control. I think a lot of what we talk about when we talk about compatibility is like, I was born this way, this is who I am, I'm looking to find my other side of my piece, right, that has been separated. I'm looking to find the person who has been crafted in the exact perfect groove as I have. Beautiful belief, but there also seems to be this other set of factors, which are less sexy and really come down to like, am I going to choose you even when we don't fit? And I wanna talk about these and so much more after this short break.

• 19:40Speaker 02

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• 20:08Jemma Sbeg?

  So in 2019, these researchers published the results of a 20-year longitudinal study they'd been doing that was attempting to answer the question, what kind of person is the best kind of person to marry? What they found was that if you have a partner who doesn't just love you, but is responsive to you, so wants to talk to you, reacts to what you're reacting to, cares about when you're hurt, cares about what you care about, this greatly reduces your chances of dying prematurely, and it greatly increases your chance of being happy, not just in your relationship, but in life. responsiveness, that's what this is.

• 20:51Jemma Sbeg?

  And responsiveness is what they found to be the ultimate sign of compatibility. You may not have everything in common. You may have an age gap. You may be raised entirely differently from different parts of the world, different cultures. But if you turn towards each other, in their words, if you turn inwards, this very action outperforms initial physical attraction. It outperforms shared superficial interests. It outperforms personality, especially in the large-scale data that we have on couples that last. responsiveness is the most critical thing. The people who first identified this concept were a husband and wife. We already kind of spoke about them. They were the founders of the Gottman Institute. Their names are John and Julie Gottman. And they essentially like have made it their life mission to be like,

• 21:36Jemma Sbeg?

  how can we make sure that people love each other? And how do we make people stay together? And they came up with the simplest test for measuring responsiveness. And it's this. You and your partner are in the same room or within earshot. And you say, oh, look, there's a bird pointing outside of the window. How your partner responds to that is mind-blowingly important. If they go, oh, my God, what kind of bird is that? Oh, my goodness, that's so beautiful. Oh, have you seen that bird before? If they come and look, if they respond to you, they pass the test. If they go, yeah, well, there's birds everywhere. Or, yeah, well, we see birds all the time.

• 22:18Jemma Sbeg?

  Or if they dismiss you and they don't respond at all, and they go, I'm busy, they don't pass the test. What they basically show is that your relationship isn't doomed if you don't pass the test, but it's probably not in a good place. And it's probably not a sign that you, not only are you compatible, but that like you're interested in each other. Now, again, I've mentioned this example before, and people have gotten a little bit cranky with me, probably because they didn't pass the test and like their partner was mad. But like, this one guy was like, that's not fair. Like, I was, I was in a bad mood and my girlfriend did this to me and now she wants to break up. So we'll roll it back a little bit and just say, there's obviously other things.

• 23:03Jemma Sbeg?

  This is one element of three that I've given for this section. But I think what it really indicates is if this is a persistent thing where like somebody genuinely is like, I don't care at all about what you are seeing or how you are experiencing life. Like, how are you gonna care in 30 years? How are you gonna care in 40 years? What they really point to is that compatibility is not this thing that is just bestowed upon you by some higher power and that you don't have to earn. It's just yours to keep. Compatibility is built through these micro bids for connection. They are built through someone's genuine interest in the other person's inner life. And it's built through how we choose to respond to the person

• 23:48Jemma Sbeg?

  and how we choose every single day to be in love with them. This really relates to the final unsexy pillar of compatibility, which is work. Like, knowing that love is a choice and choosing to work for this kind of love. There is this deeply entrenched belief, as I said, that love is just luck. Love is just fate. Like, the right kind of love just finds you. What we're increasingly finding is that in the research, these destiny beliefs about love are not as helpful as a growth belief that love is something that you choose. In 2024, this group of researchers, they followed 900 couples for two years.

• 24:28Jemma Sbeg?

  Couples that came into their relationship feeling like what they had was predestined or one of a kind, they experienced the sharpest drop in relationship satisfaction of all the couples. People who instead believe that love is something that you choose, it's effort, it's a choice, they saw the greatest increase in relationship satisfaction. It's not as romantic, but love is inevitably as much a decision as it is a feeling. There are, of course, a few reasons for this. I think destiny beliefs change how we interpret really normal things about a relationship. There's a reason why people who think that love is just this thing that's given to you

• 25:11Jemma Sbeg?

  and, you know, you never have to work on, and there's a reason they break up quicker. It's because any sign of a problem is evidence that they've chosen the wrong person rather than just evidence that you're in a relationship. If you believe that compatibility is something you either naturally have or you don't, and it's either really good or it's they're not the right person for you, any sign of conflict or disagreement is a lot more scary than it needs to be. And it also means that, you know, we're very much likely to disengage, avoid problems, just walk away, walk away, because the perfect relationship wouldn't have this. And this doesn't match our preconceived notion of compatibility.

• 25:55Jemma Sbeg?

  Therefore, it must be this relationship is a dud, this relationship isn't working. You know what? It's hard not to believe that. Like, this perfect idea of love as being the easiest thing in the world, that just sounds amazing. And there are all these sensational stories of couples who've been together for 30 years and they've never fought, and they've never spent a day apart, and they still love each other as much as they did the day they got married. Those stories rise to the surface because they are outliers, because that's not the norm. But we confuse them with being the norm because they're the most accessible. You know, if they were the norm, we wouldn't pay as much attention. Most people's relationships do get tricky and they do get hard, especially if you've been with somebody for a couple of years,

• 26:40Jemma Sbeg?

  especially if you've been with somebody for a couple of decades. Like, any friendship, relationship, family member like you would have had disagreements with. That is why that alternative, those growth beliefs that we spoke about, are so protective. And when they're shared, when both people believe that love is something you build, that makes them extra compatible. If you're sitting in front of the person you love and you both know that like this isn't always gonna be easy, we're probably gonna have really, really hard points in our story. At some point, the worst thing to happen to both of us might happen at the same time, but we're still gonna choose one another. Your chances of making it last are a lot greater. And I also think it's less claustrophobic as well.

• 27:22Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, when you have these destiny beliefs, as I said, like, a fight means so much more than a fight. And I think that the other reason destiny beliefs may make for less compatibility is that

• 27:35Jemma Sbeg?

  it like, it paints love as this like one enormous choice, right? And you make it and you're done. And then the love fades because it's actually a million little choices. I also think it becomes harder to choose because there is always this belief lingering that there could be something better. If love is this like enormous choice that you only have to make once, you really wanna make it with the right person. And that means it's very hard to make that choice with anybody because there's always gonna be a reason not to be with somebody. I wish people talked about that more. Like, there is always going to be a reason. And it might not have to do with who they are. It might have to do with circumstances. But if you want to find a reason that your love is not destined,

• 28:19Jemma Sbeg?

  you can find one pretty quickly. But again, that's a choice. Like, you are making that choice to search for that, the same way that you can make a choice to not and to be with them, even if there's parts of them that maybe you don't like that much. Like, or parts of them that you have to grow to love. The thing I actually love about this, and I know it's not as romantic and it might be scary that like, oh, my God, love is hard work. But I love it because it also accounts for the fact that people change and that doesn't necessarily mean the end of a relationship. If compatibility is just, you know, these two souls, these two people who are deeply aligned and similar, what happens when you aren't similar anymore? What happens when you evolve in different directions? That's gonna happen.

• 29:00Jemma Sbeg?

  Does that inevitably destroy all relationships unless somebody has to compromise and grow in the same direction as somebody else? There was a 2017 study published in the Journal of Personality Psychology, and it found that we do change across our lives. Our levels of extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, all change. You can go from being an extrovert to an introvert to an extrovert. And especially when you go through periods like when you have a baby or like when you get married, you're going to see those changes. Zoom up and just like you're gonna see those changes happen on a much larger scale. You know, this study uh looked at fifty thousand people and the person you enter a relationship as,

• 29:46Jemma Sbeg?

  even if you stay together, is not the person that you end the relationship as. Like, people change as they age, they change when they experience hard times. And if similarity was all you had, if thinking about things the same, the exact same way or having the exact same way, like the exact same traits was all you had, how are you still gonna be with somebody when that's not the case? You know, it's like, I think the best example of this is, well, maybe it's not the best example, but I do think it's an interesting example is like this idea that seventy five percent of couples who lose a child um don't make it because it just fundamentally changes you so much

• 30:30Jemma Sbeg?

  as a person and it just fundamentally changes your entire dynamic that there is no level of like prior physical attraction or prior level of of soulmate bondingness that's going to help you endure that if you get to a point of being like, I just like, we just can't be together. Like, we think all these things are protective and really inevitably it's like that nothing is bigger than the tragedy of life and like having to choose to work through that. I think it's also this thing of like, not just can I do this with this person, but do I want to? Like, is there something about them that still fascinates me, excites me, even if they're not like me anymore? Like, that's really what it comes down to.

• 31:13Jemma Sbeg?

  I guess is what this research is saying is compatibility is, do I want this? Am I going to choose this again and again and again? Even if maybe there is a more attractive choice, but I, I want this more. I want this version of love and I value this kind of love the most. Okay, so the final thing I wanted to focus on for this episode is not what feeds compatibility, but what destroys it over time. What differences do we see in the relationships that make it not just in terms of what they had at the beginning, but what they don't do? And I don't just wanna think about the relationships that like make it, but the relationships where people are happy and like each other. What are they doing differently?

• 31:55Jemma Sbeg?

  So we're gonna talk about more of the Gottmans research again for this section. These guys have done it all. They have published hundreds of studies on what kills long-term compatibility over time. And one of them probably stands out as the most famous and the most useful. Apparently, you only need three minutes to tell if a couple is gonna get divorced in the next six years. In nineteen ninety nine, the Gottmans published this groundbreaking piece of research where they invited a hundred and twenty four newlywed couples to talk about like a fight that they they were having. And for the couples who inevitably got divorced, the conversation always began with really harsh criticism. It always began with disgust or contempt and neither person attempted to de-escalate. These couples always got divorced.

• 32:41Jemma Sbeg?

  In the couples who stayed married, they started their conversation with humor, with goodwill, with generosity, and they both de-escalated. They both wanted it to go down rather than up. There was a huge difference between you are so lazy and you never do anything and I know you're having a hard time, but this is what I need from you. That difference is what they they basically simply concluded was that difference is the divorce rate. Which side of this coin do you choose? That is going to determine how happy and stable you can be in both your best and worst moments. Basically, what they were finding is that, you know, in this six-minute period, that is reflective of everything afterwards.

• 33:20Jemma Sbeg?

  And can you put your own feelings aside for a moment and choose to approach disagreements as a unit, as an us versus the problem rather than a you versus me? From this, from this one experiment, they began to also notice some other patterns. So in all these couples that they were seeing who were like failing this test, there was a specific kind of communication style that was almost always present. In fact, there were four. And there was four with one being the worst. And if one of these four was present in the relationship, the Gottmans were basically like, something needs to be done here. So the first was criticism.

• 34:01Jemma Sbeg?

  This was when a complaint about something your partner has done becomes an attack on who they are as a person. It is the difference between, I wish you had told me you were going to be late and you never think about anybody but yourself. That's the split. One addresses the behavior and the other attacks their character. And once somebody feels like, well, this person already thinks that I'm a loser, it's very hard to be receptive to changing what you think stems from that loser-ness, right? It's hard to acknowledge the criticism without jeopardizing your ego. The second one they noticed was defensiveness. So our instinct is to protect ourselves when we feel attacked,

• 34:45Jemma Sbeg?

  usually by making excuses, denying responsibility, or immediately turning the criticism back on to the other person. Criticism comes first. Defensiveness is the position that the other person is put into. You know, it's the, you're so lazy, you never think about anybody. And then responding, well, if you weren't such an awful person to me, maybe I wouldn't have to act this way. The problem is, is that defensiveness, just like criticism, maybe not as bad, leaves literally no room to like actually work on a problem together. And so essentially what the Gottmans said was that when you get to this stage, the problem solving like has left the building. The third one they identified was stonewalling. This is when one person, both people, just immediately withdraw from the interaction.

• 35:30Jemma Sbeg?

  They stop responding, they go silent, they look away, they leave the room, they like refuse to speak about things. The distinction with this one is that stonewalling might be a response to criticism and defensiveness. It also just might be of all of these different ones, like it is the one that kind of happens incidentally and because somebody's trying to protect themselves. It's something that we've learnt to do from previous relationships, maybe with our parents, maybe with our family, especially if we have an avoidance for conflict. What it doesn't help with those, again, that problem-solving element. If every time somebody is like, I wanna bring these helpful things to the table because I wanna improve our relationship, we withdraw,

• 36:13Jemma Sbeg?

  the opportunity for improvement disappears just as like basically every single time. So those are the first three, criticism, uh defensiveness, stonewalling. The final horseman of this relationship breakdown apocalypse was contempt. This is like criticism with an entirely different layer, which is, you always do this, I don't, and therefore your character is deeply flawed. And also therefore I hate you, basically, like you always do this and I hate you for it. Of all the four horsemen the Gottmans identified, contempt was the strongest predictor of divorce. Like, in nearly all cases, that was, that's where it was going.

• 36:55Jemma Sbeg?

  Because it's like, you can be, you can criticize somebody, it might not be nice, but you can criticize somebody and still want the relationship and and be and be criticizing somebody because you you see potential for improvement. You can't have contempt for somebody and think that the relationship is gonna improve. Because once you get to this level, you just feel like they are deeply flawed. And you have an intention often, as they said, to hurt this person, to wanna make them feel bad, and so the relationship is broken down. What makes these behaviors so destructive is that the disagreement stops being neutral

• 37:34Jemma Sbeg?

  and it becomes a problem that is about the other person rather than about what you are facing together. And essentially, what they say is it becomes like a territory fight, like who's gonna win, who's gonna lose. I like this research. I really like it, even though it sounds big and scary and and even though, if I'm gonna be completely honest, like I've probably fought with my partner from a place of defensiveness, I've probably stonewalled before. I like it because the whole premises of their research is that unlike every other indicator of compatibility we're given since we're children, this is something we can actually change. And I think it also gives us this very clear understanding and a very clear litmus test for when you and somebody else

• 38:20Jemma Sbeg?

  aren't compatible because you don't wanna change, which is, you know, not just like how do you love, but like how do you argue? That is the clearest sign of compatibility. It's not like, is the is the love there? It's like, is the love there in spite of the times when you have hatred for this other person? Hatred maybe being a strong word, disagreement with this other person. I wanna talk about that some more, why fighting is maybe the biggest sign of whether you're with the right person and some of the research that supports this after the short break.

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• 39:26Jemma Sbeg?

  So as I said before the break, it turns out all of the mystical, magical things that we think make somebody right for us, based on the stories and based on the fairy tales. The research is actually saying, take all of that, throw it away. What you really need to look at is, how does somebody treat you when you fight with them? What I found so interesting is that, especially in our twenties, like, we don't want to fight with our partner. Like, when you're in the early stages of a relationship, you really just want to look at all the fun stuff. And it's actually the ugliest parts of a relationship where you are really going to know whether this person is with you for the long term. Again, it made me think about a lot of these claims from people that, like, we never fight. We've never had a disagreement.

• 40:11Jemma Sbeg?

  That used to seem like, to me, the best sign that these guys were, like, gonna make it. Like, wow, these people don't fight? They must be the best couple in the world. But one final paper I want to talk about essentially says that if you don't fight, you are missing out on some of the best information you will ever get about the other person, which is, what do they really think about me? And can I see myself in their eyes as they're arguing with me? Like, what do they? How are they gonna treat me at the worst point? So this paper that I'm referring to was published in 2013. It was a paper by Campbell and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And what they did was they brought married couples into the lab.

• 40:56Jemma Sbeg?

  And like the Gottman study, they had them discuss an unresolved problem in their relationship for about 12 minutes. And the researchers filmed them. And they talked about, you know, do we want kids, messiness, family, money? What they found was that conflict acted as what they called a diagnostic situation. When somebody felt that their partner fell short of their ideals, particularly around warmth and trustworthiness, they behaved more negatively. They behaved less positively. And their partner picked up on that. They picked up on the fact that, like, you're not treating me well. After the conflict,

• 41:39Jemma Sbeg?

  that caused them to adjust their perception of how they believed their partner saw them, based on the way they had just been treated. In other words, we are surprisingly good at reading between the lines of an argument and detecting, what does our partner really think about us? Like, what are we arguing over because of the subject? And what are we arguing over because of us? This is the big resounding conclusion to this entire episode. It is very easy to be in love when you're on holiday, when you have just met, when you are having fun, or it's a good time in your relationship. But all that tells us, actually, is very little. It doesn't tell you much about the future. When your partner is really angry at you,

• 42:23Jemma Sbeg?

  when you are furious, when you feel betrayed, when there is something that, like, you just can't, like, communicate, do they still treat you with respect? Do they still love you even when they fundamentally disagree with you or dislike you? I want to finish with one final study from 2020. It's perhaps one of the most comprehensive ever done on this entire subject, which is what makes love last? And it essentially summarizes all the points we've made today. It was a study by Joel and colleagues that looked at 11,000 couples, so almost 20,000 people. And it essentially said, the people who like each other have a few things in common, whether they are at year five or year 50 of their relationship.

• 43:07Jemma Sbeg?

  They, A, felt like their partner was committed to them for better or for worse, without marriage at times, like, with or without marriage. They just felt like they were committed. B, they felt appreciated. C, they felt like the other person was happy. And D, they fought and they fought well. Look at that. That's literally it. All my talking, all my jibbering, and one study summarizes it all. But that is essentially the crux of compatibility. Do I like you even when I don't like you? Will I choose to be with you even when it's not the easiest choice? I'm gonna end this episode with a caveat, though. I love looking at the research. I love examining the numbers and the data and the trends.

• 43:51Jemma Sbeg?

  But in every single study, there are always people, without a doubt, who don't fit the mold. Always. Psychology is such an imperfect science at the end of the day. Like, we really like, we like to believe that we, as humans, all act the same and we follow the same rules and that we can scientifically determine what those rules are using experiments. But if your parents have been happily married for years, but they fight like hell, but they're still obsessed with each other, like, don't go questioning it too deeply. Or if you and your partner are actually exactly alike and you're both introverts and you're both conscientious and you're both agreeable, you share the exact same, I don't know, enneagram or whatever it is, like, that's not a bad thing.

• 44:35Jemma Sbeg?

  I feel like it gets really mixed up where it's very easy to create this checklist of like, okay, is it good or bad to have the same personality? Is it good or bad to be attracted to somebody? Really, what we're all coming back to is like, do they like me? Do they love me? Are they choosing me? That is, like, the highest form of compatibility that you can find. Plus, am I doing the same things for them? Because I like them and because I enjoy them. That is all I have for this episode. A long and winding one, but an interesting one nonetheless. And I love doing these episodes where I can kind of take it and apply it to my own life and my own relationship as well. And definitely, like, me and my boyfriend are having so many discussions about this of like, what makes people compatible?

• 45:18Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, could you cook up the perfectly, like, the most perfectly compatible couple in a lab? And probably not. Like, if they don't want to be there. The studies are saying no. So it's a very, very interesting one. I want to thank our researcher Erin Somerville for her help with this episode. If you want to check out more about the psychology of your twenties, you can find episodes on Netflix. Yes, we're on Netflix if you haven't checked it out yet. You can follow us on Instagram at That Psychology Podcast, where we do more, like, quick, minute, like, kind of infographics if you just want the summary of these episodes. And Substack for the transcripts, of course. We're gonna leave everything in the description, as well as some of the research that we used for the study

• 46:02Jemma Sbeg?

  and some of the critical findings that they had that we couldn't include here. Make sure that you are subscribed or following along, wherever you are listening. Give us a five-star review. Leave a comment down below as well. If you've made it this far, hello. What do you think makes people compatible? Do you think it's a choice? Or do you think it's something that we haven't mentioned yet? Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

• 46:32Speaker 02

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• 47:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.