Choosing a partner: your job reveals little about what you want in one

Nurse, engineer, programmer: does the industry someone works in say anything about whom they want as a partner? Hardly, suggests a study by psychologists Peter K. Jonason (Vizja University) and Dritjon Gruda (Católica Porto Business School, Maynooth University), published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences and reported by PsyPost on 15 October. Via the Prolific platform, the team surveyed 1,974 adults from seven Western industrialised countries, including the United States, Germany and South Africa. Based on their current industry, participants were grouped into people-oriented (746), things-oriented (289) or abstract-oriented (710) work. In a forced-choice task they repeatedly had to pick between two of five traits – physicality, compassion, competence, compatibility and character – once for a short-term fling and once for a long-term relationship.

Differences between the occupational groups were almost all small enough to count as statistically negligible. Those in things-oriented jobs did choose physical attractiveness slightly more often, but about two-thirds of that gap disappeared once sex was taken into account. Sex and relationship type mattered far more: for a long-term partner, men chose physicality more often on average (1.13 versus 0.60 choices for women), while women chose compassion more often (2.51 versus 2.08). For a short-term fling, physicality rose from 0.85 to 2.33 choices (on a 0 to 4 scale). Country explained about five times more of the variation in compassion choices than occupation did. “Your job says very little about what you want in a partner,” Gruda told PsyPost.

The authors acknowledge limitations: they measured industry, not actual vocational interests – a nurse and a data analyst can both work in healthcare. The study is a snapshot that cannot establish causes, covers only Western countries and excluded non-heterosexual and non-binary participants because the groups were too small. The one occupational link – men in people-oriented jobs choosing compassion more often for long-term relationships – did not survive correction for multiple tests. Psychologist Toivo Aavik of the University of Tartu, who was not involved, said that “a large sample cannot fully compensate for an indirect measure of the central concept.” The PsyPost report gives no information on funding.