Scientists found that couples who hate the same bands reported stronger feelings of love, and similar personalities didn’t explain it
Most people assume couples click because they are alike deep down: similar personalities, similar values. Psychologists at the University of Innsbruck put that to a test with 309 couples. Both partners answered separately about their personality, their values and their tastes, and the researchers then shuffled everyone into thousands of random fake couples to see how much real partners actually matched. Personality barely mattered. Something else did.
The something else was music. Real couples were far more alike in their music taste than randomly paired strangers, with an effect size of 0.93, which researchers count as large. Shared values came a distant second at 0.38. Personality was almost nothing at 0.08, meaning real partners were barely more similar in character than people thrown together by a computer.
The researchers write that this places couples’ music taste at the higher end of how much partners resemble each other on anything, in the same range as intelligence, political views, religiosity and education.
That fits, and sharpens, what earlier work found. A 2023 analysis in Nature Human Behaviour pooled decades of studies on 22 traits and found that partners are often strongly alike on things like politics and education, but only weakly on personality. A 2013 study of 54 couples had hinted that music and film tastes match unusually well, but it was too small to be sure.
The new paper ran three separate studies in Germany and Austria. Partners filled out questionnaires on their own and named up to three artists they love and three they cannot stand. The team then re-paired everyone at random 5,000 times to see what similarity looks like by chance, and compared real couples against those fake ones.
The second finding is about whether matching music taste actually helps. Across all three studies, couples who loved the same artists rated their relationships slightly better, even after accounting for similar personalities, values and musical training. Similarity in broad genres did not show the same link. And in one study, sharing the same disliked artists was linked to stronger feelings of love.
“Shared musical taste is not what makes or breaks relationships but it seems to help a little,” senior author Marcel Zentner told PsyPost.
Why would music matter more than personality? The researchers suggest that taste in music works as a shortcut for a whole bundle of things that are hard to see on a first date: lifestyle, daily habits, how people handle their emotions. They write that music preferences “may act as a proxy for broader compatibility-relevant characteristics.” Couples who like the same bands may also spend more time together at concerts or listening at home, and shared quality time is a known predictor of relationship satisfaction.
For anyone dating, the takeaway is light: comparing playlists may tell you more than comparing personality quizzes. About 60% of established couples say they have a song that defines them, according to research the authors cite. Music says a lot about people, and the feelings in popular songs have been changing too. Over the long run, what partners give each other may matter as much as how alike they are, as research on marriage and aging suggests.
There are limits to what this shows. Most couples were young and in fairly new relationships, and in the study with older, longer-term couples, music similarity was not linked to relationship quality. The couples who volunteered were happier than average, which is common in couples research. The study cannot tell whether partners chose each other for their music or slowly came to like the same songs, and it was not preregistered.
The links between shared taste and relationship quality were small. The authors received no specific funding and reported no conflicts of interest.
Source
Vigl J, Ihrig FL, Greif M, Zentner M. “Harmonies of Taste: Shared Music Preferences and Compatibility in Romantic Relationships.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2026.
DOI: 10.1177/19485506261472146
Also cited
Horwitz TB, Balbona JV, Paulich KN, Keller MC. “Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analysis of 133 traits.” Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01672-z
Lundy DE, Barker BC, Glenn AJ. “The role of aesthetic preferences similarity in attraction.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, 2013.
DOI: 10.2190/EM.31.2.e
