New Research: Your Dating Partner Could Be More like You

Sharon Moore November 02, 2012

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How far can you go to win the heart of someone you really like? Will you do anything – including becoming the person you have never wanted to be?

Every one of us has a desire deep within to become good and eliminate unwanted behaviours or flaws that keep us from being the person we want to be. But what if the person you are attracted to has those flaws? Will your views about yourself change? In their study, researchers Erica Slotter and Wendi Gardner found that when people are attracted to flawed potential partners, their romantic desires may encourage them to see themselves as having the same flaws as well.

How did the researchers arrive to this conclusion?

For their study, the researchers recruited a number of single college students and asked them to rate a range of characteristics from the positive ones to the most negative. They rated how positively they viewed each trait and how much of such characteristic described them.

Then, the participants read a profile of another student who was “allegedly” from the same school. The profile was designed to include the trait that each participant rated as both negative and uncharacteristic of themselves. For example, if they rated themselves as being “selfless”, the profile provided to them had to be “selfish”.

Participants were randomly assigned to consider each profile to be either a dating profile or a professional profile (a student who was running for student government position). The latter served as the control condition while the former is the experimental condition.

You are who you date

After reading the profile, the participants were asked to rate themselves again in a similar manner with that of the first experiment. When they thought the profile was for a student who’s running for a position in the student government, participants did not rate themselves any differently. Meaning, their views about themselves did not change in a non-romantic situation.

But things changed when participants considered the student profile in a romantic context. After being presented with dating profiles that have characteristics opposite to their positive traits, they rated such negative traits as being more characteristic of themselves. For example, students who initially rated themselves to be quite selfless and noted that they dislike selfish people considered themselves to be more selfish after seeing an attractive profile of a selfish person.

In a follow-up study involving a community sample of adults, the researchers obtained the same results. After being exposed to a flawed yet potential romantic partner, participants were more likely to consider themselves having the same flaws.

What do their findings suggest?

According to the researchers, people are willing to acquire the negative flaws of a potential partner in an effort to gain his or her affection. The study however, did not test whether or not people will actually adopt those negative traits. Like for instance, if their potential mate is dishonest, will they become dishonest too and behave in that way? Their findings only suggest that people are willing to consider or see themselves as more flawed when it comes to a romantic context. While it is possible, more research is needed to determine if people are also willing to go the extra mile and become exactly like their flawed potential partner to be able to win the game called love.