Are You and Your Partner Temperamentally Compatible?

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When we were young, most of us used to say — in conversations about our hypothetical future partners — that we wanted someone with “a good personality.” It was clear what we meant, back then: someone stable, charming, upbeat, and funny. But looking back, it seems like “personality” might not have been what we were really describing. After all, personalities vary greatly, and not just according to how witty or lively a person might be. So maybe we weren’t really talking about personality, but something deeper — something called temperament.

Colloquially, temperament isn’t the structure of a personality itself, but the ground that personality is built on. It’s the foundation of all personality traits, governing the basic ways in which each person responds to new situations, handles emotions, and interacts with others. You might say “disposition” or even “style” when you’re talking about temperament; some people have a “sunny” temperament, while others might be described as more “fiery” or “gloomy.” “Temperament refers to early-appearing variation in emotional reactivity,” say researchers David Rettew and Laura McKee in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry (2005). Schröder et al (2022), writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, put it in more detailed terms, describing temperament as “relatively consistent, basic and individual dispositions that underlie and modulate the expression of activity, reactivity, emotionality and sociability.” They, along with Rettew and McKee as well as Stifter and Dollar in their 2016 book, Temperament and Developmental Psychopathology, point out that temperament is based in biology — which means it is stable throughout the human lifespan, from infancy to old age.

If you’re wondering about your own temperamental predisposition, ask yourself how often you feel negative emotions. Think about how easy it is — or how difficult it is — to hold back when you have an impulse, or to change your thinking when you know you’re not making a good choice. In Psychology Today, Steven Stosny (2010) describes temperament as “what it feels like to be you,” and as “your innate emotional tone.” Another way to frame it, according to Stosny, is as an allocation of your inner resources of energy. What’s easy for you to do, and what requires effort? Are you more inclined toward action than reflection, or are you more thoughtful? Do you need to live within a structure, to help guide your actions and decisions, or do you prefer more freedom so that you can carefully think through your options and choose what’s right for you?

As I’ve noted, temperament is said to be quite stable over time. In the European Journal of Personality, Daniel C. Kopala-Sibley and his colleagues reported that measures of temperament (like parent reports and laboratory studies) of subjects at three years old were moderately consistent with other, similar measures of the same children at age 12 (2018). Even so, however, temperament doesn’t fully govern your decisions. Choosing goals and activities that flow from your inner personal style can make a big difference. For instance, someone with an energetic, outgoing temperament might do well to find work involving a great deal of interpersonal interaction, whilst someone whose temperament is cooler and more contemplative might be happier working on individual projects. It’s important to learn to recognize and cope with your own needs, in this way, by setting consistent and appropriate expectations for yourself.

The same is true about your expectations for others. As a biologically determined component of personality, temperament can have a very significant effect on your relationships. Although opposites — people with opposing temperamental styles — do not necessarily attract, minor differences in temperament may enhance interpersonal attraction by causing you to be drawn to someone with a personal style that you admire but don’t embody. Stosny points out, however, that “energy level and anxiety regulation” are the qualities arising from your basic temperament that will most likely affect your ability to get along well with dissimilar people. In other words, conflicts can easily arise if someone who tends to be anxious has a partner who feels relaxed in the same situations. Such a mismatch can easily exaggerate the temperament-based qualities on both sides, entrenching the conflict to the point where the relationship is put in jeopardy. A pursuer-distancer dynamic can develop in this way; as Stosny puts it, “Anxiety in the high-energy partner elevates in response to the care-free demeanor of the other partner, who in turn tries to "let go" or "back off" in response to the increased anxiety.… The more anxious one partner becomes, the more "laid-back" the other seems.”

If you find that you and your partner have arguments like these — potentially arising from basic temperamental differences — there are some basic strategies you may employ. Cohen (2023), who wrote in Psychology Today about the effects of temperament on relationships, recommends developing comfort with and understanding of your partner’s personal style. If you, for instance, are able to “warm up” to new people and new situations easily, you can work to recognize and empathize with the sensitivities of a partner who takes a little longer to do so. Likewise, if you have a little less energy to socialize than your partner, it might help to let them do their thing — to bounce around a party, or meet a group of new people — without negatively comparing that behavior to your own. Supporting a partner, Cohen suggests, means working to adapt to situations that highlight your differences; it means validating a style that isn’t yours. Being patient with and attentive to your partner’s needs can help you both reduce the likelihood of an argument.

Beyond temperament, this bit of advice is applicable to many other, similar situations, and could serve as a rule of thumb for many different types of relationship conflict: developing empathy for another person’s point of view always helps and never hurts. And in this case, understanding the stable, biological basis of temperamental differences between you and your partner might just make it easier to get along.