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Relationships
Should You Choose a Romantic Partner Who "Completes" You?
Why we gravitate to mates so different from us and how things turns out.
Posted July 16, 2024 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- People often seek out mates who "complete" them, whose traits complement their own.
- People often unconsciously admire traits in others that they lack in themselves. They seek an opposite.
- Opposite-trait couples may experience relationship conflict that leads to breakup or divorce.
There are several ways we make mate choices. One way is to look for mates who complete us. If you are shy and a potential mate is outgoing, you might seek that person out. You might think that each of you would complete the other.
In their book Build the Life You Want, Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey call this complementarity. They say relationships need some compatibility but “really need ... complementarity to complete you as a person.” Introverts need extroverts. They say there is more conflict with alike mates.
In the 1950s, Robert Francis Winch learned by interviewing couples that the "happiest couples tend to round out each other’s personality.” More recently, in 2006, Figueredo, Sefcek, and Jones’ research found that we “wind up pursuing long-term relationships with people who are different from us.”
My clinical work indicates that mates often engage in an unconscious process and search out mates who complete them in a twosome. Later on, they may have increased conflict, break ups and divorce. Why?
Why Do People Seek Complementary Love Mates?
Each person admires traits that they lack but find helpful in the other person. “How I wish I could be so sociable and outgoing,” thinks a shy, inhibited person. “How I wish could be more reserved and shyer at times,” thinks a life-of-the-party person.
The thinking is, "we’d have a great marriage with his being so neat and meticulous and with my being messier and not paying close attention to detail. "
Errors in the Unconscious Thinking Process
The error in this thinking process lies in believing that the opposing traits of each individual partner will yield a balanced couple. This does not happen. Individual traits and personality characteristics belong separately to each person. That is how each person functions, thinks, and behaves, in roles unique to them.
A self-centered person will continue to be self-centered as a mate. An other-focused caregiving person will maintain that role as a mate. Both may believe they will be whole or complete in a relationship in which one person gives and the other takes.
Such thinking is irrational , as the wholeness they desire does not happen. Relationship balance is not the same as a person having balance within herself or himself.
Choosing mates by such an irrational method as idealizing them or thinking they’ll complete you leads to later relationship conflict, precisely because each person is so different from the other. Neither can step outside his or her role and be what is needed both for themselves and for the other person.
A self-focused person may demand attention and care and up their requests as time goes on. A caregiving person may try to fulfill such demands with lavish attention on the partner.
The caregiver may eventually become exhausted from giving much and getting little in return. Neither person is balanced or complete within themselves. The self-focused person finds it difficult to give to a partner. The other-focused person finds it difficult to ask for care from a partner. Both may grow disgruntled, angry, and fatigued. Breakup or divorce may result.
How to Escape the Attraction of Completeness
1) Discover your own personality and role. Do you like primarily to give support or get support in love relationships?
2) Discover the types of people who attract you. Realize such attractions may be heightened with love feelings but may backfire over time.
3) Discover the types of people who are attracted to you and why. You may be a magnet for people who will harm you or not fulfill you psychologically. You may be a magnet for people who want to totally care for you and thereby stunt your psychological growth. Understand what characteristics of people most easily attract you in relationships. Recognize that they may not lead to the best choices for you.
4) Date people you are not zingy, crazy in love with at first meeting them.
5) Learn to look for possible mates among people you’ve been ignoring.
6) Learn to respond to more than emotional cues from possible mates. Introduce thinking about what you and they are thinking and doing. Ask questions. Don’t assume thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the other person.
References
Brooks, A.C. and Winfrey, O. (2023). Build the Life You Want––The Art and Science of Getting Happier, Portfolio/Penguin, NY.
Figueredo, A.F., Sefcek, J.A., Jones, D.N. (2006). The ideal romantic partner personality, Personality and Individual Differences, 41(3):431-441.
Martin, H.B. and Adams, C.B.L. (2018). Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships, Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA.
Winch, R.F. (1955). The theory of complementary needs in mate-selection: A test of one kind of complementariness, American Sociological Review, 20(1):52-56.
