Your job says little about what you want in a partner, study suggests
Does a nurse want a different kind of partner than an engineer? In a study of nearly 2,000 adults across seven countries, the industry people worked in had almost no link to what they prioritized in a partner.
A new study suggests that a person's job has little impact on their preferences for a romantic partner, according to research published in Personality and Individual Differences. Across seven countries, participants' sex and whether they were imagining a short-term or long-term relationship were more strongly linked to their partner preferences than the sector they worked in – people-focused, things-focused, or ideas-focused.
The study, led by researchers from Vizja University and Católica Porto Business School, involved 1,974 adults from the United States, Germany, and South Africa. Participants completed an online survey about their current employment and romantic preferences, and then made choices about what qualities mattered most in a partner – physicality, compassion, competence, compatibility, and character.
The researchers found that occupational orientation had almost no association with partner preferences, with people-oriented and things-oriented workers making practically identical choices. The only exception was compassion, which men in people-oriented jobs chose more often than those in things-oriented jobs, but the difference was small and disappeared when accounting for sex.
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