How does personality affect your relationships?

How does personality affect your relationships?
Most of us are lured by the enticing idea of simple relationships. We'd all want to believe that our most intimate relationships are unconditional and strong enough to weather whatever life throws at us, whether it’s happily-ever-after marriages, friendships that last forever, or parent/child ties that surpass the need to understand each other. However, most of us must face the reality of relationships and make an effort to preserve healthy, decent, and even fantastic, good links that may be damaged due to neglect at some point in our lives. Understanding your personality type as well as the personality type of the other person in the relationship will add a new dynamic to the situation, allowing for better communication and comprehension whether you're attempting to improve love, familial relationships, friendships, or employer/employee relationships. Although different types of relationships have quite diverse characteristics and needs, it appears to be two basic features that are critical in all relationships: expectations and communication. What do we anticipate from ourselves and the other person in the relationship? How can we convey these expectations, as well as our thoughts and ideas, to the other person in the relationship? How does our personality type influence our communication expectations and methods? Is it true that our personality type influences whom we are romantically attracted to? How does it influence our friends and those we work best with? If you need any support with your mood swings, our therapists and counselors can help you.

Opposites Attract: Dissimilarity

Over eons, people have tossed about the phrase “opposites attract.” And this is certainly relevant in romantic relationships. We are naturally drawn to those who are different from us and so somewhat fascinating. But it’s not simply the fascinating disparities that entice us to seek out our opposites; it’s also a fundamental need for fulfillment. When two polar opposites unite, they create a better-rounded, effective entity. There’s also the theory that the natural attraction of our opposites is a subconscious way of forcing us to confront our own flaws. While we are drawn to our opposites, opposing forces in a romantic relationship encounter significant problems and communication barriers. So, in some respects, our attraction to the opposite personality might be interpreted as our subconscious brain forcing us to confront the aspects of life that are the most difficult for us. But when it comes to working with colleagues or friends, we are rarely interested in working with people who are diametrically opposed to us. We are most at ease with people who share their interests and opinions, and we lack drive and tolerance when interacting with our opposites.


Birds of a Feather Flock Together: Similarity

Although we are drawn to people who hold substantially different views of life than we do, we are drawn mainly to those who have a similar emphasis in their lives. Couples that have a strong personality function appear to have the longest and happiest relationships. A person whose major function is Introverted Sensing, for example, appears to be naturally drawn to those whose primary function is Extraverted Sensing. Two individuals of any kind who are well-developed and balanced may chat and connect, but many people prefer to converse with others who share their information-gathering preferences. Of course, this doesn’t imply that individuals with disparate interests can’t have happy, successful marriages; rather, it shows that people want to marry someone who is on their comparable “wavelength.”

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Additional Constructs Important in Personality and Relationship

Emotionality
When dealing with emotionally charged situations and conflicts, emotion management may be essential. Understanding the sentiments of one’s spouse and oneself can assist to preserve the intimacy and a nice emotional environment. The capacity of a couple to notice, control, and deal with their or their spouse’s feelings may be critical for marital quality, happiness, and contentment. Emotion dynamics can also predict psychological maladjustments such as low trait self-esteem and neuroticism.

Impulsivity and Maladaptive Traits
Many studies on relationship quality have focused on neuroticism and its components, which include anxiety, hostility, melancholy, self-consciousness, and wrath. Low self-control represents impulsivity, and while it isn’t openly a tenet of neuroticism, it is consistent with the negativity of maladaptive traits. Impulsivity is related to more frequent negative conduct and fewer good actions in a relationship. Greater impulsivity is related to riskier actions, less tolerance for a partner’s behavior, less perspective-taking, more family conflict, and more intimate partner violence. In addition, impulsivity affects perceived partner attention. People sense less attentiveness from their partners when they have (or are seen to have) less self-control, which predicts lower relationship satisfaction and stability. However, it is possible that it will not have long-term implications. Higher levels of impulsivity were associated with greater early marital suffering, although this did not invariably predict deteriorating misery or divorce over time.

Self-Esteem
How we feel about ourselves heavily influences the way we function in life, and it would therefore be expected to have a similar influence on how we choose our partners and the satisfaction of our romantic relationships. Self-esteem as a mediator for personality traits has been examined with generally consistent results.


Changes in Personality

While the Big Five personality traits appear to remain consistent throughout time, a recent study reveals that the personalities of couples alter in relation to big life events such as marriage. The vast majority of people experience medium-to-large adjustments in one‘s Big Five personality traits as they encounter adulthood, and life events, experiences, and preconceptions can all lead to changes in These consequences of personality qualities vary substantially depending on life experience and personality attributes. The impacts of an event are likely to be determined by both how the experience alters a person’s daily thoughts, feelings, and actions and the match between these altered thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and the specific personality feature that is impacted. Although some theories ascribe these mean-level changes in personality to underlying temperamental or genetic characteristics, others link them to external influences such as new social roles and experiences (i.e. marriage).


Self-Awareness Is the Key to a Happy Relationship

Finally, acknowledging you’re own and your partner’s personality traits may significantly improve your relationship. You can more effectively highlight one another’s abilities if you know how each of you handles certain situations. As a consequence, it is prudent for the two of you to investigate this in order to strengthen your bond.

Our therapists and counselors can throw some light on your personality type and help increase your bond with your significant other. Visit www.ganeshaspeaks.com.

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