Mariel Marcano-Olivier

So it has been studied before, but we weren't as confident about it.

And now we can be, now that we have that really big lot of quantitative data.

Yes.

So assortive mating is essentially the way that we describe selecting people, selecting partners based on their attributes.

It's literally that you

assault mates depending on who who fits you better now for someone with a psychiatric condition or a neurodevelopmental condition so let's say autism somebody with autism might really struggle with things not following a certain time frame or time scale and then someone with OCD might also struggle with people not following a time scale so then those two people might

sort of meet each other and be, as I sort of said earlier, have that sort of like completing one another thing.

And for some people it can be really, really wonderful.

But for others, of course, it can be a bit more, a bit more toxic, a bit more damaging.

I think that that is absolutely something that could be considered.

But I do think that there is absolutely more to this study and these findings than that.

I think that the understanding, the empathy, the experience sharing that you would have with your partner if they also experience mental health struggles, I think that is...

part of what helps keep people in these couples together and it's that that positive side of it that can be a lot more influential than sort of the negatives now of course many of us will have known people who've been in relationships and you sort of think oh

that person's perhaps a little bit chaotic and this person's a little bit perhaps needy.

And then the chaos and the need for stability doesn't necessarily match up.

And so whilst they both have mental health conditions, their symptoms don't align and that can then become really quite toxic.

But when you have, for example, say two people with autism,

It can be a really fulfilling thing for people with autism to be in a relationship with another neurodivergent person because they don't have to explain every aspect of their lived reality, which can be so different for neurodiverse people when compared to neurotypical people.

For example, if I'm autistic and if I was to come in and sit down on the sofa next to my partner after a long day at work, he knows not to talk to me for like 45 minutes.

And then after 45 minutes, I'll be more than happy to talk because I've sort of calmed down, I've decompressed.