From the archives: Are you a Taylor Swift fan or not? Thousands of Kiwis travelled across the ditch for the US megastar’s Australian concerts, putting - among many other things - musical preferences in the spotlight perhaps more than usual. In this 2022 article, Marc Wilson considers the impact differences in musical taste may have on relationships.
There are many sayings about relationships. “Birds of a feather flock together”, for example, which I’ll take to mean that like attracts like. But don’t “opposites attract”? Should I swipe right if a profile suggests we’re similar, or different?
In fact, research shows relationships are more likely to last when partners are similar. Or at least not dissimilar (there are some areas where dissimilarity is more of a problem than others.) Differences in religious faith can be a deal breaker, as can different aspirations around family, if one partner wants children and the other doesn’t. Recently, differences in political attitudes have placed increasing strain on familial and spousal relationships in places marked by great partisanship. We’ve even seen this infect our own landscape. Accompanying this has been an increase in the number of therapists and websites offering advice on how to navigate the differences.
I predict a wave of research that looks at the effects of different vaccination attitudes on family and intimate relationships. The issue of vaccination has a lot of these elements bundled up in it – it’s political, it means making decisions for children if you have them, and it may even have a religious element for some people.
Enter controversial US podcaster Joe Rogan and Spotify. Although Spotify hosts a great variety of content, including podcasts, it was initially developed to promote wider legal access to music, thereby reducing piracy. Music is an important part of many people’s lives, as signified by the more than 180 million Spotify subscribers in December last year [2021]. This figure may have decreased a little in recent times, since the boycott of Spotify by some leading musicians in response to Covid misinformation being aired on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Does musical taste matter when it comes to romance? What if they like pop music, but I like punk? I’ve tried for something that feels like a contrast there, but research tends to show this isn’t an unlikely combo of between-partner musical tastes. Women have a greater preference for “lighter” musical styles, and men like a bit of grrr in their music. Rock and heavy rock, I mean.
To help answer the question of whether shared musical tastes predict relationship success, I’ll turn to a completely un-peer-reviewed source: a 2019 survey of about 1000 people by US events ticket company TickPick. Among other things, two-thirds of respondents said they would date someone with different musical taste, but only 55% said they’d date someone whose musical taste was “bad”. Eight out of 10 said their musical tastes were more similar to than different from their partner’s. Based on the survey, TickPick concluded “only 2% of couples survived when each person had completely different music tastes”.
There it is. Break up now if you like completely different music.
But that’s rubbish. It’s not clear where this conclusion comes from, but one piece of data fits the bill: “Only 2% of the couples surveyed had very different music tastes.” Now, this may be the case for the respondents in this survey, but it’s still a survey, and that makes it hard to support claims about the potential temporal and causal role of musical dis/similarity in relationship success.
Surveys of what couples argue about never show musical taste to be a big deal; we’re much too busy worrying and fighting over finances, communication, and household chores.
But music is an icebreaker, because most of us listen to music, and that gives us something to talk about when we know nothing about a person. This doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, however. As well as reflecting our gender, our music also reflects our personality. As such, it can be a shorthand for the type of a person we are. Complementarity of personalities is important for relationship longevity. For that reason, I think TickPick’s got it the wrong way round. Maybe only 2% of people with very different tastes start a relationship.
This story is from the NZ Listener’s archives. It first appeared in the February 19-25, 2022, edition of the NZ Listener.
