You have a ‘type’ of person you are likely to date and you can’t change it – study

So more often than not when we are asked gleefully what kind of person we are interested in dating, it turns out that the type of person we are attracted is hard-coded into us.

The new study, carried out by the University of Toronto, Canada sought to find out if people dated the same type of person across relationships by studying 332 people in current and past relationships.

The partners were asked to assess their own personality traits related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness to experience, reporting on how much they identified with a series of statements such as “I am usually modest and reserved”, “I am interested in many different kinds of things” and “I make plans and carry them out”.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that people did indeed appear to look for relationships with the same type of person again and again, with the team finding that both current and ex-partners described themselves in a similar way.

Said lead author Park Yoobin:

It’s common that when a relationship ends, people attribute the breakup to their ex-partner’s personality and decide they need to date a different type of person.
Our research suggests there’s a strong tendency to nevertheless continue to date a similar personality.

Co-author Geoff MacDonald

The degree of consistency from one relationship to the next suggests that people may indeed have a ‘type’. And though our data do not make clear why people’s partners exhibit similar personalities, it is noteworthy that we found partner similarity above and beyond similarity to oneself.