ICYMI: Simple Answers To Complicated Health Questions
A: People tend to pair with partners who are similar to them.
It’s not your imagination. According to a large-scale Swedish study published in JAMA Psychiatry, people with one of 11 different psychiatric conditions were more likely to find a mate with one of those disorders. (People with schizophrenia, for example, were seven times more likely to pick a partner with the same condition.)
While the reasons for paring off with a like-minded individual are definitive, researchers believe that the sexual selection process of assortative mating — basically choosing to mate with someone who has similar characteristics — could be at play.
“At a certain level, individuals feeling that their way of looking at the world is shared are drawn together,†Victor Reus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, told Scientific American.
The researchers did not find any significant romantic association among individuals who suffered from non-psychiatric conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.
MORE: Scientific American