A new study by Mikhila Humbad and colleagues at Michigan State tested whether spouses converged in their basic personality over a long marriage.
They don't.
This is not really so surprising, though. Our basic personality characteristics are one of the most stable parts of us. We may come to look and sound more like our spouses as we come to imitate one another's facial expressions and speech. But personality mostly stays put.
What this study really shows, I think, is that people with enduring marriages were similar in values, and complementary in personality, to begin with. The researchers note that they do not have many recently married couples in their study - not surprising, since they were piggybacking on the long-running Minnesota Twin Study to find their couples.
I would expect that couples with dissimilar values and non-complementary personalities would be less likely to make lasting marriages.
But neither the couples in the real study, nor the couples in the hypothetical study, would be likely to show much personality change.
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What this study really shows, I think, is that people with enduring marriages were similar in values, and complementary in personality, to begin with.
Could you expound on how it shows that? From my reading of the article, the study only found that most spouses are more similar than two randomly picked individuals. (I'd wager the same is also true about close friends. It seems logical that people we choose to associate with closely are similar to us.) I did not see any reference to longevity.
You may be theorizing that, if most married couples are similar, the dissimilar couples are less well-matched, but this study did not seem to take any measures of the quality or duration of the marriages of the couples who participated from my (admittedly brief) reading of the article linked summarizing the study.
The crucial word in my sentence, which I probably should have italicized, is enduring. Because they were using the Minnesota Twin Study dataset, the only marriages they had to work with were old ones. As they say in the paper, they could not compare a group of shorter marriages.
My guess is that couples who do not match in values will be more likely to break up before they get to the marriages lengths that the Humbad study considered.
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