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VECTOR ILLUSTRATION
Rachel Whitt was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration with a minor in Graphic Design. She has
done illustrative and design work for a variety of clients, and her work has been published by Creative Quarterly, Applied Arts Magazine, and the Port City Review. She enjoys creating images that are whimsical and conceptual in both traditional and digital mediums.
Rachel Whitt | Illustrator
CIRCUS CHARACTER DESIGN
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36 | FEBRUARY 2014 | TIME TIME | FEBRUARY 2014 | 37
OPPOSITES ATTRACTBirds of a feather fly together. That’s a fact.
Or is it? Reasearch tells us the wider the differences between individuals, the more
one wants to know about the other.
By Rachel Whitt
Y es, it’s tue, opposites do attract. For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Think resurrection/death, procrastination/effect, balance/disorder, creativity/
stagnation, vice/virtue, flood/drought, hard/soft, hot/cold, heavy/light and so on. Sharing the same outlook on life and having the same core values is what keeps a realationship together in the long run, or so we thought. Research also explores the why and wherefores of the dynamic components that include why the “good girl” is attracted to the “bad boy” or why the “good cop” also had a history of petty crime during their juvenile years. Penguins,
morning doves, and swans choose life partners, human beings don’t. In fact, monogamy in our species, and that of the great apes researched by professionals has been deemed unnatural.
So in your relationship, is it a matter of “opposites attract” or “birds of a feather”? The question of whether similar or dissimilar personality traits are a source of romantic attraction and marital satisfaction has been debated for years. There are those who propose a complementarity hypothesis claiming that partners may be more satisfied with those who differ with them on certain personality traits because these partners complement them or offer what they don’t have: she is a thinker; he is a doer. Reflecting this sentiment, Tim Lahaye, in his book Opposites Attract maintains that people with similar temperaments never marry because like temperaments repel — they don’t attract. Similarly, Harville Hendrix, author of Getting the Love You Want, proposes that “There’s a polarity in the universe physically that is also reflected in relationships, especially when it comes to personality traits. So a high-energy person will be attracted to a low-energy person.
Incompatibility makes for a dynamic, powerful, growing, exciting relationship.” Disagreeing with this, authors Scott Lililenfeld, Steven Lynn, and Barry Beyerstein describe “Opposites Attract: We Are Romantically Attracted to People Who Differ From Us” as one of the 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology in their 2010 book by that title. These authors contend that most studies demonstrate that people with similar personality traits are more likely to be attracted to each other. This similarity-attraction hypothesis seems to hold up across characteristics as physical attractiveness, attachment style, political and religious attitudes, socio-economic background, and level of education, according to Pieternal Dijkstra in his 2008 article “Do People Know what they Want: A Similar or Complementary Partner?”
So do opposites or similarities cause attraction and satisfaction? Maybe both. A 2007 study reported in Psychology and Aging by Michelle Shiota and Robert Levenson entitled “Birds of a Feather Don’t Always Fly Farthest,” sheds some light on this. This study examined the relationship of similarity in The “Big Five Personaiity
“OPPOSITES ATTRACT” EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION MOCK-UP
