Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits. Neurotic people tend to be easily annoyed, anxious, and insecure, with a tendency towards depression. That sucks, right? Well, neurotic people can stabilize in a relationship.
This result comes via a study published in the Journal of Personality. Researchers interviewed 245 couples, ages eighteen to thirty, both as couples and as individuals. They figured out their subject’s levels of neuroticism with a questionnaire (like this one), along with a survey about relationship satisfaction.
Neurotic people tend to react more strongly to negative events than other people; they are also more likely to interpret ambiguous situations as negative. Knowing this, researchers asked their subjects to imagine fictitious everyday situations (“He forgot what time you were coming over” or “she parked in the driveway again”) and evaluate the possible significance to their own relationship. Neurotic people tend to interpret this kind of thing negatively; however, the tendency tends to decrease after some time in a good relationship.
Obviously, this isn’t to say that a relationship will solve all your problems—but chances are, it can’t hurt.
