Mate Evaluation Theory, and the Challenge of Explaining Romantic Compatibility
Compatibility is the central component of romantic desire and relationship quality; that is, some romantic pairings fit better than others. It is puzzling, then, that the most intuitive “attribute-matching” perspectives (e.g., similarity matching, ideal-partner preference matching) perform quite poorly in accounting for compatibility. This puzzle can perhaps be resolved by drawing from the Mate Evaluation Theory distinction between two sources of compatibility: (a) interactions among perceiver and target individual-difference variables, vs. (b) factors that are uniquely bound to one relationship in particular. It may be that interactions among individual differences generally do a poor job of explaining compatibility, and most of what makes a relationship good or bad derives from narrative history and idiosyncratic reactions that are linked to a specific other person. This talk will illustrate different methodological approaches for tackling this puzzle, as well as additional predictions that derive from the insight that compatibility is due to forces that are truly relationship-specific, rather than interactions among individual differences.
