Do you often wonder whether you are better off choosing a partner with a similar personality and hanging out with friends who share your values and interests? Or do you go by the belief that opposites attract?
When choosing romantic partners, everyone has a type. Ensuring your type’s personality is compatible with yours can be the key to guaranteeing a successful relationship.
If you've taken a Big 5 Assessment, you learned your score on the openness vs. closedness to experience spectrum.
- Open individuals love to explore. The promise of daring adventures and new experiences excites them, and they seek this in all their relationships.
- Closed individuals love their routines and comfort zones. The possibility of experiencing new things would scare them.
In theory, a relationship between an open person and a closed person should be impossible. However, reality can often differ, and sometimes opposite personalities attract and flourish together.
This article explores the relationship style and compatibility of people with openness and closedness to experience traits. We examine how your personality affects your relationships and whether you are more compatible with a partner with similar or dissimilar characteristics.
Openness Vs. Closedness to Experience: The Role of Personality in Relationships
The Big Five traits have a considerable say over how your personality affects your relationship because they are relatively unchanging over time. Several researchers have opined that exploring them is the key to understanding the role of personality in relationships. They can use the concept of those traits to investigate successful and unsuccessful relationships.
Only two Big Five personality traits (agreeableness and neuroticism) are inherently positive or negative regarding their effect on relationships. These traits are easy to study because agreeableness is generally desired in relationships, while neuroticism contains several detrimental sub-traits.
The other three factors (extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness) are less obvious. They might depend on other factors to determine how they affect relationships.
Effect of Openness and Closedness on Different Types of Relationships
Most people often forget that relationships extend beyond the romantic aspect alone. No matter how great your romantic partner is, it would be best if you had other kinds of relationships to find fulfillment in your life.
Other types of relationships include friendship, work relationships, relationships with strangers, etc. We want to
explore how open and closed people build relationships with total strangers, co-workers, friends, and romantic partners.
Relationships with Strangers
In most cases, closed people only interact with strangers if it is for an important reason, like asking for directions. They are generally uncomfortable around strangers and exercise caution when they are around people they don't know. Their relationship with strangers is virtually non-existent, and communication is usually due to necessity.
People high on the openness to experience trait are fascinated by strangers. They want to interact with them because they believe in opening themselves up to new and daring experiences. They will talk with strangers they meet on buses, trains, and airplanes. Their relationship with strangers is so great that you mistake them for close friends.
Work Relationships
The openness to experience trait is key to building great relationships in the workplace. Openness promotes open communication and transparency and builds trust between employees and the organization.
An individual who is high on openness is more likely to thrive in a workplace that contains people of diverse backgrounds. As a leader, being open to experience means you welcome dissenting opinions from your employees and involve them in decision-making. As an employee, your creative approach to work and your willingness to listen to your co-workers’ ideas help solidify your work relationship.
People low on openness often struggle to build solid work relationships because they do not communicate well with their co-workers. They are unwilling to discuss ideas with their colleagues and struggle to relate with people of diverse backgrounds.
Friendships
The popular saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” is very accurate when describing the type of friends suitable for your personality. More often than not, people make friends with those who share their values and interests.
Closed people make friends with people with similar personality traits. They might not make friends as freely as open people. Still, they usually build long and lasting relationships with their few friends.
Open people make many friends because of their ability to interact with people freely and exchange ideas while keeping an open mind. They usually have a large and diverse group of friends.
Romantic Relationships
Choosing the perfect romantic partner is easier said than done. And even after finding the ideal partner, you still have to work hard to ensure your relationship lasts long.
In romantic relationships, open people find a way to create new experiences and embark on adventures. They have little interest in settling down with their romantic partners and developing a routine lifestyle. They derive joy in meeting new people, traveling to places, trying new activities, and exploring uncharted waters. For their relationship to work perfectly, they need a romantic partner with similar interests and values.
Closed people are comfortable with their traditions. They are averse to change and usually find joy in consistently doing the little things that open people find boring. Closed people do not enjoy trying new things or leaving their comfort zone. So, it is better for the relationship if their romantic partner scores similarly on the closed-to-experience scale.
The Relationship Style of Open People: Strengths and Weaknesses
Open people are curious, imaginative, and risk-loving. Their love for adventures and new experiences makes them willing to build interesting conversations with strangers. They make friends quickly because of their open-minded personalities. Still, despite having many friends, they rarely develop deep and meaningful relationships with most of them.
Their love life is filled with adventures and risks. They are more compatible with romantic partners who are open to experience and equally love taking risks and creating new experiences. The early stage of their romantic relationship excites them because the experience is still fresh, and they are just learning new things about their partner. Their dates usually involve visiting new places and trying new foods. Once the relationship develops, they are more willing to try new styles and positions in the bedroom to create new experiences and spice up their sex life.
Because of their love for creating novel experiences, they might have trouble settling down with their romantic partner and living an "everyday" stable life.
The Relationship Style of Closed People: Strengths and Weaknesses
Closed individuals have few friends, but they usually build deep, meaningful relationships with those friends. Their friends typically have similar personalities as they cannot keep up with open friends who love adventures. They are set in their ways and often live their life based on schedules or routines that they repeat weekly. Their relationship with strangers is non-existent, and they do not interact with co-workers as freely as open people.
Closed people usually choose romantic partners with similar traits. Starting a relationship might be difficult, but as soon as they become comfortable around their partner, they have no trouble maintaining the relationship. This is because their satisfaction lies not in spicing things up but in doing their routines consistently.
They are usually satisfied with the sex position they find most comfortable and are generally reluctant to try new styles or positions. When tasked with finding new restaurants for date nights, they usually think of how things could go wrong due to the unfamiliar terrain instead of being excited by the adventure. The thrill of trying new foods and visiting new places does not excite them because they fear the unknown.
Relationship Compatibility between Two Open or Two Closed Individuals
As an open individual who enjoys fun adventures and risk-taking, your best chance of having a successful romantic relationship is finding someone who shares your interests. Just the thought of having a "normal" boring relationship scares you. The minute you stop having fun and trying new things in your relationship, you want to end it.
A compatible partner for you will be someone who is equally open to experience. This way, you do not have to compromise on what you love doing, and you can both enjoy the ride together.
As a closed individual, you cannot cope with that kind of relationship. You find great satisfaction in having a routine and planning your relationship meticulously so there are no surprises. You want to settle in the suburbs and live comfortably with your partner while having a secure job. The success of your relationship depends on finding a partner who is comfortable with the kind of lifestyle you want.
It is still difficult to determine the direct impact of the openness trait in a couple on the quality of their relationship. However, a study in 2004 by Watson et al. showed that similarity in the openness trait between newlyweds led to greater satisfaction in their relationship. Another study by Luo and Klohnen in 2005 also linked similarity in the openness trait to satisfaction among married couples.
Relationship Compatibility between Open and Closed Individuals
No one is either a hundred percent open to experience or closed to experience. In theory, a relationship between someone who scores very high (above 80%) on the openness to experience spectrum and another who scores very low (below 30%) is likely disastrous. They are both so far from the middle of the continuum that expecting one to change for the other is unrealistic.
Luckily, most people have varying levels of openness and closedness traits. A relationship between someone with a 60% score on the openness scale and another with 35% might not be doomed for failure. This is especially true because other personality traits also impact relationships, not just a person’s level of openness. For example, a highly agreeable person may go out of their way to make things work.
The following section discusses tips to improve your chances of success if you and your partner have different personalities.
How to Ensure Compatibility in Your Relationship Despite Having Different Personalities
At first glance, we may struggle to see how two individuals with different personalities can make their relationship work since their compatibility is in question. However, as long as there is love between the two partners, their widely different values and interests can work in their favor.
According to Buddhist sex therapist Dr. Cheryl Fraser, you can improve relationship compatibility if you are willing to find a complementary common ground. Fraser also suggested doing the following to enhance the relationship with your partner.
- Find a common interest that appeals to both of you.
- Try to set aside time to explore your shared goals and individual differences.
- Support your partner’s solo interests.
Finding a common interest is important because it ensures that despite having different personalities, you can still do things you both enjoy. After finding common interests, you must set aside some time to explore them to avoid drifting apart from your partner.
It would be best if you also found time for your solo interests to keep the spark alive in the relationship. And while your partner's solo interests may not appeal to you, you still have to support and celebrate them.
Don’t forget, Openness is just one of Big 5 trait that influences how we approach relationships. Learn how the traits of Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness also play a role how you interact with others.
Learn more about Openness vs Closedness:
