Why You End Up Dating People Who Aren’t Your Type

It’s easy to believe that each of us “has a type.” I know an appealing dating app profile when I see it, just like I’m well aware of who catches my eye on the street or exerts a gravitational pull on me across the room at a party. It’s hard not to organize the characteristics of these people into a type, isn’t it? We naturally turn to concepts such as height, fitness, education, temperament, or religious affiliation, and maybe combine our preferences for those traits into an ideal partner, when we try to imagine the right person for us.

But my gut sense of who is attractive to me, on closer examination, isn’t reflected in the people I’ve actually dated. When it comes to the traits I think I want, whether it’s ambition, intellectualism, athleticism, emotional openness, or a particular body type, my partners have often deviated a fair bit from my professed “type.” Maybe this is the case for you, too? In recently published reviews, established relationship researchers Paul Eastwick and Samantha Joel provide insight into why who we think we want is often not who we end up dating.

Just this year, Eastwick and Joel (2025) published a huge review of mate evaluation research—in plain language, the science of how people perceive their potential (and actual) romantic partners. Their first big point: you can ask people all day what they find attractive in a partner, but none of the many traits people list—including physical attractiveness—stand out as being more important than the rest in predicting how satisfied people are with their relationships.

Not just that, but the traits we say we find attractive actually predict little of the variance in our relationship satisfaction. That’s statistics speak for, “the traits you say matter to you aren’t actually strong indicators of whether you’ll be satisfied dating a particular person.” This seems to be true for pretty much everybody. Eastwick and Joel also note that gender differences in desirable traits are pretty limited and not useful predictors of actual relationship satisfaction.

So, why do I know what I’m attracted to initially about a person, but these aspects of attraction don’t matter much once I’m partnered with somebody? Why have you been happily partnered with somebody who’s “not really my type on paper” or “not who I expected to fall in love with”?

In a paper from 2023, co-written with their colleague Eli Finkel, Eastwick and Joel give us an answer. Using what they call Mate Evaluation Theory, they draw attention to how the information we have about potential partners changes over time, and why that might make all the difference (Eastwick et al., 2023).

When evaluating a potential partner, we have lots of information about their apparent traits, but almost no experience relating to them. Lacking experience with the person, we rely heavily on what we know about ourselves, and traits that are universally considered desirable, to evaluate their worthiness as a mate. As we spend more time with that person, however, we evaluate them less on how conventionally desirable they are or how much they fit our preferred traits, and more on how they behave with us, how it feels to be in relationship with them. And that kind of fit—the fit of how it feels to be together—is a much stronger predictor of relationship satisfaction.

Does this mean you should stop choosing potential partners based on whether they have traits you desire? Hardly. Compatibilities such as sharing interests with a partner and feeling physically attracted to them will always matter. But we should all try to stay aware of how little we know about our potential partners, and how truly important the knowledge gained from experiencing them in relationship is. Statistically speaking, how it feels to be with somebody more powerfully predicts relationship satisfaction than whether we look like a good match on paper.

So, don’t ignore your initial attraction signals, but stay open to the possibility that your “type” reflects what you value in general, but can’t predict how a particular person will actually make you feel in relationship. If somebody doesn’t check all the boxes you have in mind, but it just feels right—or even amazing—to be spending time with them, listen to that intuition. How we relate to each other, how we make each other feel, is what seems to count most, and that’s why you may end up (happily) dating somebody who doesn’t seem to be your type.