It doesn’t take much to figure out that if we are agreeable, conscientious, open-minded, and emotional stable, we make good partners. However, very few of us have all these positive traits — most of us are positive on some and negative on others. There are highly conscientious people who are weak on emotional stability, or highly agreeable people who are closed-minded.
But even with our bad quirks, we can get by with a little over-compensation. Take people who are disagreeable but also highly conscientious. While they’ll probably instigate arguments, they will also work hard to make their partner happy in other ways. It’s the balance of our good and bad traits, with the good cancelling out the bad, that makes us tolerable to others. Only those who lean more negative across all traits will have chronic relationship problems specifically because of their personality traits.
So, all you need is good balance of strengths and weaknesses and everything will work out fine, right? Wrong.
