What Type Are You Drawn To?
Not who you say you want - who you keep choosing
Everybody has a type, and almost nobody's type matches the list they would give you if you asked. The list is made of adjectives: kind, funny, ambitious. The type is made of the person you actually walk across a room for, which is a different thing and rarely flattering. This one is for fun, and the useful part is not the result itself - it is whether you recognise it from your own history.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer with your first instinct rather than the answer you would defend out loud. This one is more entertaining if you are honest and it will not tell anybody.
What it measures
Which of five recognisable pulls is strongest for you: excitement, safety, cleverness, being needed, or sameness. It is a bit of fun rather than a measurement, and there is no research saying these five are the right five - they are simply the ones most people can name from their own past.
Possible results
The Spark
You go towards whoever makes the room louder
The Harbour
You go towards whoever makes you feel safe
The Mind
You go towards whoever can argue with you properly
The Project
You go towards whoever needs you
The Mirror
You go towards whoever already gets it
Common questions
Do opposites attract?
Mostly not, as far as anyone has been able to measure. The reliable finding runs the other way: people pair up with others who resemble them in values, background and outlook far more often than chance would produce, and similarity predicts getting on. Opposites are attractive in the short term and in stories, which is probably why the saying survives. What does differ usefully between people is temperament rather than values - one person who plans and one who improvises can work very well, provided they want the same things out of the week.
Can you change your type?
The pull probably not, or not quickly. What changes readily is what you do about it, and that is most of the outcome anyway. Nobody decides who they find magnetic, but everybody decides who they call back. The practical version is small: give people a third meeting, since almost all types make their mistake in the first ten minutes - the spark by deciding too fast that there is nothing there, and the project by deciding too fast that there is.
An honest note This one is for entertainment. The five types are a writing device rather than a research finding - nobody has established that attraction sorts into these five, and most people will recognise themselves in two or three of them. What is worth taking seriously is not the label but the question underneath it: whether the pattern you recognise has been working for you. Where the research does have something to say, the descriptions say so, and it points in one direction that is fairly consistent - similarity of values predicts getting on better than opposites do, and how kind somebody is predicts more than how interesting they are.