Does Marriage Make Us More Alike?

Sept. 1, 2010 — -- If you live with your mate long enough, eventually you will look like each other, think like each other, and become so similar your friends will have trouble telling you apart, right?

Not really, according to new research that challenges the long-held belief that many years of cohabitation causes spouses to grow more alike as the years roll by.

The research, by psychologists at Michigan State University and the University of Minnesota, is based on a relatively huge data base of 1,296 couples who have been married for an average of 19.8 years. It was published in the current issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

What they found is that couples who had been married for a long time -- up to 39 years -- were no more alike in fundamental personality traits than newlyweds, leading the researchers to conclude that personalities do not grow more similar as the years pass. More likely, the couples were looking for specific traits during the courtship and they ended up with someone who was very much like themselves.

"They may not have been conscious of that at the time," Mikhila Humbad, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Michigan State and lead author of the study, said in a telephone interview.

So does that forever put to rest the thought that opposites attract?

Not necessarily, because the study focused on personality traits, like extroversion vs. introversion, a happy disposition vs. a sourpuss, a social butterfly vs. a hermit. Those traits are likely to remain constant throughout an adult's lifetime, Humbad said, unlike hobbies, interests and life-changing events that can also define us.

So this is a fairly narrow window, but it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. After all, we all know someone who even ended up looking like the family dog, so surely our personalities converge as we blend our lives together. Maybe not.

When Humbad and her colleagues began studying the large data base collected by the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research they were struck by the fact that married couples seemed so similar to each other, at least in terms of definitive personality traits.