Somebody looks up Campaigner and Adventurer. The first page says the pairing has natural chemistry and shares a love of spontaneity. The second says both partners avoid structure and the relationship tends to drift. Neither page cites anything.
The pairing is ENFP and ISFP. Both descriptions were written from the same four letters, and the disagreement is not a disagreement about evidence, because there is no evidence in the room.
256
ordered pairings a complete chart has to fill
6%
of the variance in relationship satisfaction explained by a person's own personality
3%
at most explained by their partner's
0.5%
explained by how similar the two of them are
Myers and Briggs never published a compatibility chart
The instrument that produced the four letters reports preferences for one person. Its documentation contains type descriptions and development material, and no ranking of pairings, no list of ideal matches, and no warning about difficult combinations.
The current publisher is blunter about this than most of its critics expect. Its own guidance on relationships says that people are more than four preferences, that personality is extremely complex, and that what contributes to a lasting relationship is a common language for understanding differences rather than a favourable combination of letters.
So the charts came from somewhere else.
The rankings came from a separate system built in Lithuania
Aushra Augustinavichute began work in Vilnius in 1968 on what became Socionics, a typology that starts from the same Jungian material as the four-letter tradition and then adds something the four-letter tradition does not have: a model of how information moves between two people, and a complete set of names for the sixteen ways a pair can relate.
Duality is the most complementary of those relations. Mirror, activity, conflict and twelve others fill out the grid. The point of Socionics was always the grid, which is why it produced pairing verdicts while the Myers tradition produced individual profiles.
The two systems use overlapping notation, so when Socionics material was translated into English and the sociotypes were written as four letters, the rankings traveled with the letters and arrived in a tradition that had never claimed them. Golden pair is a popular rendering of duality. So is the idea that certain pairs are natural opposites who complete each other.
| Where a ranking comes from | Who built it | What it was built on |
|---|---|---|
| Duality and the sixteen intertype relations | Aushra Augustinavichute from 1968 | A model of information processing layered onto Jung |
| The four temperaments and their pairings | David Keirsey | Observable behaviour grouped into four temperaments |
| Relationship articles under the modern nicknames | A commercial profile site | Its own five-aspect model built on trait research |
| The original four-letter instrument | Myers and Briggs | Nothing, since it published no pairing guidance at all |
Read the last row against the first three. Every confident verdict on the internet about which types belong together comes from one of the upper rows, and almost none of them say so.
What the large samples say about pairing
There is a clean test of the underlying idea, and it has been run on samples far larger than anything in the type literature.
Dyrenforth, Kashy, Donnellan and Lucas used three nationally representative samples of married couples in 2010, from Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, totalling more than 23,000 people. They separated three effects. How satisfied a person is given their own personality, how satisfied they are given their partner's, and how satisfied they are given how similar the two personalities are.
- Own personality: 6%
- Partner personality: 3%
- Personality similarity: 0.5%
Similarity came last by an order of magnitude, and it stayed last in all three countries. A compatibility chart is a device for converting the smallest of those three columns into a verdict.
Montoya, Horton and Kirchner found something that explains why the charts still feel right. Pooling 313 investigations in 2008, they reported that measured similarity predicts attraction strongly before two people have met and not at all inside existing relationships, while perceived similarity predicts attraction at every stage. What matters is whether two people feel alike. Whether they are alike, by any instrument, stops mattering once they know each other.
Why any pairing can be narrated both ways
Take any two codes and the same difference supports opposite stories. One partner plans and the other improvises, which is either balance or a standing argument about the weekend. Both partners feel deeply, which is either intimacy or two people with no thermostat in the room.
That flexibility is the reason compatibility content is so easy to produce and so hard to falsify. A verdict that can be written in either direction from the same facts is not making a claim about the world, and the reader supplies the evidence from their own relationship while reading.
What to do with the question instead
The search that brings people here is almost never idle. It follows a specific incident, and the hope is that a chart will say whether the incident is fixable.
The comparison worth making is dimensional rather than categorical. Two people who both score near the middle of an introversion scale will negotiate a weekend very differently from two people at the far ends, and the four letters hide exactly that difference. The couple compatibility test here scores both partners on the same dimensions and reports where the gaps are largest rather than issuing a verdict on the pairing, which is the only version of this exercise the evidence supports. The comparison between the type frameworks covers which of them are measuring and which are naming, and the ENFP profile keeps the compatibility list on the page while saying plainly what it does not know.
Nobody looks up two type names to learn about typology. They look it up to find out whether the thing that happened last week is a sign. A chart will always answer that question, and the confidence of the answer is the strongest evidence that it was not measured.
Sources
- Dyrenforth, P. S., Kashy, D. A., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E. (2010). Predicting relationship and life satisfaction from personality in nationally representative samples from three countries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(4).
- Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., Kirchner, J. (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25(6).
- Socionics. Relations of duality between psychological types.
- The Myers-Briggs Company. How compatible are you and your partner, based on your Myers-Briggs type?
- The Myers & Briggs Foundation. The 16 MBTI personality types.