What Love Isn't European and North American culture, over the last century, has tended to frown upon traditional "arranged marriages", stressing instead the absolute importance of romantic love. And yet divorce rates have soared to over 50%. Clearly, neither the intensity nor the seeming certainty of romantic love are a good indicator of the long term success of a marriage. On the other hand, how often have you heard succesful married couples say "we're best friends." Translated into psychological terms, that means "we're compatible." The outstanding characteristic of long-term married life, it seems, is not intense romantic love but compatibility.

The problem, then is that love and compatibility are not the same thing. If romantic love involves a sudden lurch of our internal life-satisfaction system into overdrive (see What Love Is), with all its attendant highs and lows (a blissful joy when one is with the beloved, a painful "sickness" and "torture" when lovers are separated), then its plain that compatibility and love are quite distinct. Romantic love engages the emotions to a high degree, partners often feel feel intense emotional states filled with excitement, urgency, impulsiveness, and confusion. Compatibility involves none of these. Again, love typically involves a mutual dependancy on the other for the intensified feelings of excitement, inner completelness and worthwhilenes.

For compatible couples on the other hand, neither depends on the other to feel complete, worthwhile, and important, secure in self-esteem and what they bring to the relationship. Couples in the throws of romantic love typically idealize each other, accentuating the positive attributes and minimizing if not utterly eliminating the negative. compatibility on the other hand, allows for the perception of negative qualities in the other while not focusing on them too strongly.

Clearly, love isn't compatibility. That is to say, both may be present in a relationship, but not necessarily. And unfortunately, recent scientific reasearch backs up anecdotal evidence regarding the primacy of compatibility, rather than the intensity of romatic love, in succesfull long-term marriages.

. A 1985 study by social psychologist found that the consistently significant factor in successful long-term marriages was compatibiity. In the happier long-term marriages the couples enjoyed each other's company, would talk, argue and listen. They tended to have similar values. Couples would not agree on everything nor did they necessarily share the same interests, but they worked out compromises to accommodate their differences, and pursuing individual activities helped some couples to remain interesting to each other. The key was in achieving a balance between time together and time apart

In another study, this time of 351 couples who had been married at least 15 years (Lauer and Lauer 1986), the 'top seven' reasons for their marital success highlited the importanceo f compatibility:

· spouse as best friend;
· liking spouse as a person;
· marriage as a long term commitment;
· marriage as a sacred institution;
· agreement on aims and goals;
· spouses becoming more interesting to each other;
· wanting the relationship to succeed.

The outstanding feature of this list is that it was identical for both husbands and wives. The researchers noted further that such a high degree of consensus attests to the critical role those attributes play in creating a marriage that will last nad that clearly, a deep and abiding friendship wass a key characteristic of these long-term marriages.

The researchers went on to stress that these happily married couples also felt that sharing important fundamental aims, goals and values helped them to create and maintain their relationship, but where there were differences of opinion the lack of consensus was not interpreted as damaging to the relationship.

Compatibility then, and not the intensity of romantic love, is the basis for the long-term success of a marriage. Best take the Compatibility Test.

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