There are Only 4 Personality Types in Love
Do we choose our partners based on our own personality type? Perhaps you’ve never even thought about that until now, or perhaps you’ve always known it to be true. Regardless, today we invite you to learn about four personality types in love that experts say are the main building blocks for lasting, loving relationships.
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4 Personalities Types in Love
There’s no sense in denying it – sometimes you fall for the person you’d least expect. Additionally, you may fall for the one that hardly matches your personality type, yet somehow complements you.
Other times you might find someone who seems like the perfect match, only to wind up in an unhappy relationship. Why does this happen? Why do we sometimes become fixated on character traits that bring us pain in the long run?
These two sides of the same coin (happiness and unhappiness) occur so frequently that it compels people to attempt to find some theoretical explanation for it.
One of the most recent books written about the subject of why some people pick certain partners over others is called, Why him? Why her?.
The author, Helen Fisher, is an anthropologist at Rutgers University. In her interesting book, she defines four personality types in love that relationships are based on. We discuss each one below:
1. The Explorer
- Tend to look for new things, new experiences
- Willing to take risks, regardless of the consequences
- Highly spontaneous
- Lots of energy
- Very curious, creative, and positive
- Highly flexible and adaptable
2. The Director
- Determined and confident of themselves
- Able to control their emotions
- Willing to express desires easily
- Prefer well-designed tasks and want everything to make sense. Perfectionists.
3. The Builder
For the builder, their main values lie in family, friends, and their union with others. Additionally, these are calm, sociable people, who are very peaceful and avoid taking risks. Typically they are:
- Calm, self-assured, and unpretentious
- Persistent
- Loyal
- Comfortable with traditional values and established rules
- Able to develop and manage social networks
4. The Negotiator
Negotiators are expressive, empathetic, and idealistic. Moreover, people of this type are usually very sensitive yet imaginative, with very open minds. Their feelings run deep and they need their emotional needs to be met. Negotiators are:
- Able to see beneath the surface, naturally intuitive
- Imaginative and sensitive
- Compassionate, with great mental flexibility and kindness towards others
- Idealistic and altruistic
- Able to express their emotions, rather than hide them
- Adept in social situations and building relationships
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What Personality Types in Love are the Most Compatible?
1. Explorers tend to complement other Explorers
Not surprisingly, people who seek a relationship based on emotion and passion in the moment fit well together. If you’re a Negotiator or a Builder, for example, you might not see eye-to-eye with the spontaneity or vision of living in the moment when you’d prefer to focus on stability and raising a family.
According to Fisher, the Explorer-Explorer combination would be the most “explosive” match, with continuous ups and downs, constant rearrangements and movement from place to place, an intense amount of love, yet either partner may become bored when they have what they want.
2. Builders make good partners with Builders
This pair values family, meeting new friends, spending time with their families, and building a future together that is stable, calm, and where they have a sense of control over every aspect of their life. These two like to play it calm and safe. Thus, there are few thrills or risks taken.
3. Directors match well with Negotiators
Lots of couples tend to establish stable and lasting relationships when they fit one of these two profiles. People who are naturally analytical, direct, and perfectionistic find happiness with more sensitive, empathetic, emotional personalities. In a way, they complement each other.
The analytical, objective side meets the intuitive, the sensitive. Both seem to be attracted to the needs of the other, or perhaps it’s simply that they are drawn to something they don’t normally experience or feel during their day-to-day lives.
Obviously, this assessment isn’t conclusive. However, the author’s intention was to give us an example of the personality types in love that often result in more durable and satisfying relationships.
It’s worth taking into account because if you’re an emotional, sensitive person who seeks stability and a quiet everyday life with your partner, it may not be best to be dating an “Explorer,” for example.
There might be passion right now, but sooner or later one of you is likely to be disappointed.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Fisher, H. E., Island, H. D., Rich, J., Marchalik, D., & Brown, L. L. (2015). Four broad temperament dimensions: description, convergent validation correlations, and comparison with the Big Five. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1098. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01098. Accessed 09/03/2020.
