So many of you know that as part of my job, I am running the Facebook and Twitter pages for Healthy Relationships California and California Healthy Marriages Coalition. (So fun! Who knew that social media would be a job skill?!?!?) Every day, I do 4 Tweets and 3 Facebook posts on each page. That means that I've spent a lot of time lately looking at relationships/dating/marriage articles online, trying to find good stuff to share.
Today I stumbled across an article on the Huffington Post called "The Athlete Mixed Marriage." Basic premise: non-athletic woman marries super athletic man, she ponders the irony that one spouse cannot live without something the other spouse would never dream of doing. One quote in particular stood out to me: "John and I are out of step with the marriage times. Hyper-compatibility between spouses in temperament and lifestyle is one of the strongest marital trends of the last decades. By 'assortative mating,' we're marrying people with almost the exact same educational background, earning potential, job experiences, ambitions, hobbies, interests, class background, and values. In other words, we're marrying ourselves."
It's true. In the modern world, there is very much a focus on marrying someone a lot like you. And, now that the barrier between genders is not as concrete as it used to be, spouses are more like each other than ever before. Back in the day, Johnny liked sports but Mary liked sewing... Now Johnny and Mary can do sports together.
I remember in my classes at BYU, we learned several times about the benefits of marrying someone a lot like you. In my Marriage Prep class, we read a book by Neil Clark Warren (the man behind eHarmony) that said every similiarity between you and your partner is money in the bank; every difference between you is a withdrawal. Study after study suggest that partners who are more similar to each other (in background, in belief, in values, in personality, etc, etc) do better.
I came out of all this with the idea that I needed to find a boy JUST like me. I realized that this would be a tall order, because a lot of my interests are pretty girly. Heck, we took a personality quiz in one class to see how "feminine" or "masculine" our personalities were, and I scored in the 100th percentile for feminine traits, 0th percentile for masculine (I didn't even know that was possible!).
But then, as an intern for Forever Families, I had an opportunity to write an article on dating. It was reviewed by Dr. Jason Carroll (a Marriage Prep professor at BYU, though not the one I took a class from). I had a whole paragraph in there about the value of marrying someone a lot like you. He commented on this that I needed to remember, some differences are inherent in any relationship. Men and women are different, after all! But those differences can actually play off one another, compliment one another, to result in a stronger relationship.
That's when I realized that I didn't need to marry my clone. :)
Coming across the article in the Huffington Post brought that all back. In an age when gender differences aren't so prevalent, I think we may have become too fixated as a society on finding our one, perfect match-someone very much like us. What we need to remember is, variety is the spice of life. While we don't want to marry our polar opposite, some differences are okay. We can be very happy with someone else who doesn't share our passion for reading, or sports, or llama herding.
I remember in my classes at BYU, we learned several times about the benefits of marrying someone a lot like you. In my Marriage Prep class, we read a book by Neil Clark Warren (the man behind eHarmony) that said every similiarity between you and your partner is money in the bank; every difference between you is a withdrawal. Study after study suggest that partners who are more similar to each other (in background, in belief, in values, in personality, etc, etc) do better.
I came out of all this with the idea that I needed to find a boy JUST like me. I realized that this would be a tall order, because a lot of my interests are pretty girly. Heck, we took a personality quiz in one class to see how "feminine" or "masculine" our personalities were, and I scored in the 100th percentile for feminine traits, 0th percentile for masculine (I didn't even know that was possible!).
But then, as an intern for Forever Families, I had an opportunity to write an article on dating. It was reviewed by Dr. Jason Carroll (a Marriage Prep professor at BYU, though not the one I took a class from). I had a whole paragraph in there about the value of marrying someone a lot like you. He commented on this that I needed to remember, some differences are inherent in any relationship. Men and women are different, after all! But those differences can actually play off one another, compliment one another, to result in a stronger relationship.
That's when I realized that I didn't need to marry my clone. :)
Coming across the article in the Huffington Post brought that all back. In an age when gender differences aren't so prevalent, I think we may have become too fixated as a society on finding our one, perfect match-someone very much like us. What we need to remember is, variety is the spice of life. While we don't want to marry our polar opposite, some differences are okay. We can be very happy with someone else who doesn't share our passion for reading, or sports, or llama herding.
