To summarize: everyone agrees on who’s hot or not, and it is better to be hot than not; past that degree of assortative mating, predicting pairwise success of romance appears to be essentially impossible.
...participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions
Psych questions are not the only info that we can consider here. In advance of actually skimming the studies, here are some things that I predict correlate with relationship success:
Physical proximity
Social status
Financial wealth
IQ (because it positively correlates a little bit with all good things)
Class, with working class people more likely to break up
Height
If none of these correlate with relationship success… I will be much more confused than I currently am.
I don’t know if we’re discussing short-term or long-term success. Are we predicting that they enter into a relationship at all, or that they’re still together 10 years later? I can imagine the latter being much harder to predict. (And one reason I could be bad at predicting the latter is if the former is anti-correlated with it.)
The only things that I know studies have shown to be predictors of how successful a relationship will be are: - Similar IQ (not necessarily high or low, but similar to each other; can’t remember the study specifically) - Lack of Gottman’s Four Horsemen: contempt, criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness (though this has largely been studied by Gottman himself because it’s hard to get anyone else to study your theories in psych)
Honestly maybe I should have just listed the four horsemen and left it at that :P
Psych questions are not the only info that we can consider here. In advance of actually skimming the studies, here are some things that I predict correlate with relationship success:
Physical proximity
Social status
Financial wealth
IQ (because it positively correlates a little bit with all good things)
Class, with working class people more likely to break up
Height
If none of these correlate with relationship success… I will be much more confused than I currently am.
I don’t know if we’re discussing short-term or long-term success. Are we predicting that they enter into a relationship at all, or that they’re still together 10 years later? I can imagine the latter being much harder to predict. (And one reason I could be bad at predicting the latter is if the former is anti-correlated with it.)
The only things that I know studies have shown to be predictors of how successful a relationship will be are:
- Similar IQ (not necessarily high or low, but similar to each other; can’t remember the study specifically)
- Lack of Gottman’s Four Horsemen: contempt, criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness (though this has largely been studied by Gottman himself because it’s hard to get anyone else to study your theories in psych)
Honestly maybe I should have just listed the four horsemen and left it at that :P