Question: Can partners with huge disparities in personality (but similar moral values) have a healthy and prosperous relationship?
– Opposite Personality
Dear Opposite Personality,
My short answer is, hesitatingly, yes.
The greatest benefit to having partners with different personalities is the fresh perspective they can potentially bring into your life. Those with personalities seemingly at odds with our own can have interests and habits that can be new and exciting to experience. If you’re a person used to hustling and never stopping to take a break, being with a more laidback person might be refreshing.
At the beginning of your relationship, you might find aspects of a person with the opposite personality really quirky, cute or endearing. If you’re a person who enjoys taking the lead and making decisions, you might think the comparatively passive nature of your partner could make things easier for both of you. However, that charming characteristic could potentially be frustrating in times they have to make decisions.
At the end of the day, you can get along with most people who share moral values similar to your own. As my favorite saying goes, “love is logistics.” In this scenario, those personality differences could complement each other.
But on the flip side, those differences could also cause clashes between the two of you.
In my experience, people who date others with different personalities often fail within a year or two. This isn’t meant to scare you; it’s simply a dose of an unsavoury truth: opposites attract, but generally don’t stay together.
The problems I’ve seen from couples with seemingly incompatible personalities stemmed directly from their inability to change their communication styles to accommodate their partner’s personality.
If your style is direct and has a tendency to come off as aggressive but the other person’s is to bottle their own opinions up in order to please others, the stark contrasts in how both of you expect the other person to respond will be vastly different. Those differences can eventually be interpreted incorrectly by the other person, which could create more miscommunication between the two of you.
If you want to have a healthy and prosperous relationship, you have to not only be open to the differences that your partner’s personality may have, but you also need to be flexible with how you communicate with them. The most important aspect of all relationships, after all, is maintaining clear and honest communication.
Try having a conversation about how and why you two communicate the ways you do. Similar to a love language, knowing how to respond to them in a way that makes them feel seen and acknowledged — no matter the circumstance — helps to maintain the openness, trust and dedication it takes to work past your differences.
Understanding why your partner may communicate in a certain way is the first step to defusing emotional situations, like being frustrated or upset. Knowing how to approach these situations will save the two of you a lot of time, energy and heartache, since you might be able to avoid any additional unnecessary conflicts. That’s not to say you won’t have fights, but the ones you do have will be easier to resolve.
If you find someone you’re interested in pursuing, and they happen to have a personality that wouldn’t seem compatible with yours, don’t be immediately put off. You’ll never know if it’ll work if you don’t take the opportunity to try.
