A survey of nearly 2,000 adults in seven Western countries found that occupation barely shaped partner preferences, while the length of the relationship mattered far more.
PORTO, Portugal (Sex News) – It is a common dating assumption that what a person does for a living reveals what they want in a partner, with people-focused workers prizing kindness and technical workers prizing looks or competence. A new study led by researchers in Europe put that idea to the test across almost 2,000 adults and found that occupation explained remarkably little. Whether someone was thinking about a short-term or a long-term relationship made a much bigger difference.
The study and its authors
The paper, titled “Sex, love, and work: What you do is not whom you want,” appeared in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. According to PsyPost’s report on the findings, the authors are Peter K. Jonason of Vizja University and Dritjon Gruda, who is affiliated with Catolica Porto Business School at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa and with the Maynooth University School of Business. The paper can be found through its journal DOI. Toivo Aavik of the University of Tartu, who was not involved, offered an independent comment.
PsyPost links a 2009 meta-analysis of occupational interests by sex and its own earlier coverage of research on work preferences across the world as background. Judging from those titles, earlier work has looked at how work interests differ between men and women, which helps explain why the new analysis checks how much of any job effect disappears once sex is taken into account.
How the survey worked
The team surveyed 1,974 adults, 968 men and 982 women, recruited online from seven Western, industrialized countries including the United States, Germany and South Africa. Participants were grouped by their current industry into people-oriented (746), things-oriented (289) and abstract-oriented (710) categories.
To measure preferences, the researchers used a forced-choice task. In each of ten pairings, participants chose between two of five traits in a partner: physicality, compassion, competence, compatibility and character. They did this twice, once imagining a short-term relationship and once a long-term one, with the order varied. Scores ranged from 0 to 4 for each trait. The team also used equivalence tests, which check whether differences are small enough to count as negligible, with a stricter threshold to account for multiple comparisons.
What mattered, and what barely did
Occupational orientation had almost no association with what people wanted. Choices for competence and compatibility were practically identical across the three job groups in both scenarios, and the same was true for character in the long-term scenario. Gruda is quoted in the report as saying: “Occupation explained extremely little in how often people picked any one trait,” a summary of the main message.
There were small exceptions. People in things-oriented jobs chose physical attractiveness slightly more often, but accounting for sex removed about two-thirds of that gap. In an exploratory analysis, men in people-oriented jobs chose compassion more often than men in things-oriented jobs in the long-term scenario (2.21 versus 1.76), though this did not survive correction for multiple tests and should be treated cautiously.
The absence of job-based differences is the study’s central point. The equivalence tests were designed to show not just that differences were statistically undetectable, but that they were small enough to count as negligible. For competence and compatibility, the three job groups made nearly the same number of choices in both the short-term and the long-term scenarios.
Sex, context and country
Sex was consistently linked to preferences. In long-term scenarios, men chose physicality at 1.13 on average against 0.60 for women, while women chose compassion at 2.51 against 2.08 for men. These are differences between group averages and say nothing certain about any individual man or woman, and the study excluded non-binary and non-heterosexual participants because those groups were too small to analyze.
The context of the relationship mattered more than occupation. Physicality choices rose from 0.85 in the long-term scenario to 2.33 in the short-term scenario, while compatibility, compassion and character each fell by roughly half a choice. Country also counted: it explained about five times more variation in compassion choices than occupation did. PsyPost also cites a 1993 paper on sexual strategies theory as related reading.
Limits readers should keep in mind
- Industry was a stand-in for vocational interests, which were not measured directly, and people take jobs for practical reasons that may not reflect their interests.
- The design is a single snapshot, so it cannot show cause and effect.
- All seven countries were Western and industrialized, so results may not hold elsewhere.
- The forced-choice task used broad, abstract traits, and the results describe group averages, not individuals.
- Aavik noted that a large sample cannot fully make up for an indirect measure of the central concept.
What this means for dating
The study offers a gentle caution against stereotyping a date by their profession. Based on these data, what a person does for work tells you very little about whether they will prefer kindness, compatibility or character in a partner. What may matter more is the kind of relationship someone is looking for: preferences shifted noticeably between short-term and long-term settings.
The results reflect stated choices in an online task, not actual dating behavior or relationship outcomes. Anyone who feels stuck or distressed in dating can talk to a qualified therapist or counsellor.
Bohiney Magazine, which covers dating and relationships from the comedy side, pokes fun at dating stereotypes at Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/