Your partner may not be your soulmate — but that doesn’t mean you two can’t have a long and happy relationship, science shows.
“Almost none of us are going to get our ideal partners,” said psychology researcher Daniel Conroy-Beam of the University of Texas.
After all, he added, the chances of finding someone single in your area who meets all your criteria is “very low.”
The good news? “We don’t need have to have our ideal partners to be satisfied,” he said.
All you need, according to his research, is someone you think is a catch compared to what you bring to the table and the other options on the market.
“It’s not so much a matter of ‘Is this person ideal?’ It’s more a matter of ‘Are they the best I may be able to get?'”
Those who rated themselves as having fewer desirable traits than their partner — i.e. they thought their partner was a better catch than they were — were generally more happy with their relationships.
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The survey included people who’d been married for years as well as those who’d just started dating.
The average survey respondents were in their mid 30s, but Conroy-Beam said the findings were consistent across age and gender.
What both sexes considered desirable, though, did differ slightly.
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What men and women want (and don’t want)
The qualities most-coveted by women (in order of desirability) were: a pleasant personality, kind, dependable, emotionally stable, intelligent, healthy, confident, desires a home and child, masculine, and ambitious.
The characteristics at the bottom of their list were: someone who’s chaste, a good cook, muscular, dominant, or feminine.
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Men were most likely to seek someone with the following traits: a pleasant personality, emotionally stable, kind, dependable, intelligent, healthy, feminine, and physically attractive.
They didn’t care as much about finding a mate who: has good financial prospects, is chaste, dominant, muscular, or masculine.
Holding on to your partner
Our mate preferences also seem to affect our relationship dynamics, the researchers found.
People who thought their partners were either better than them or close to perfect, devoted more effort into hanging on to them.
“This included making themselves extra attractive for their partners and ‘mate guarding,’ or shielding their partners from mating rivals to help keep their partners,” Conroy-Beam said in a statement.
Unfortunately, jealousy and possessiveness don’t tend to end well.
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