When I meet remarriage members, there are often times when I wonder, “How could this person have married someone so incompatible?” What is even more surprising is that both the person and the former spouse are usually intelligent and capable people. When buying even a single object, people compare this and that carefully. Why is marriage not like that? Then again, I also think that relationships between men and women have many aspects that cannot be judged so easily.

A 70-year-old man joined as a remarriage member, and surprisingly, he had been divorced five times. The first two divorces were from the same woman. In his mid-30s, she unexpectedly became pregnant, so they got married. A few years later, they divorced. Then, because their children wanted it, they reunited, only to divorce again. He said the cause was personality differences. Perhaps there really are people who simply do not fit each other.

A few years ago, a former model, businesswoman, and TV personality revealed that she had divorced after 22 years of marriage. She said there had been a serious difference in temperament and personality between her and her former husband. She liked creative and fun things, while her former husband was so quiet that people called him almost scholarly and reserved.

In this way, personality differences are among the problems many couples face in married life, and there are some differences that cannot be overcome even after living together for a long time. That is why personality is considered very important when choosing a spouse. There is an interesting statistic related to this. The weight people place on personality differs between first marriage and remarriage.

Couple.net, a global matchmaking platform, analyzed the importance of personality among ideal partner conditions for 120,000 never-married and remarriage-seeking men and women who used the site over the 20 years from 2005 to the present.

The results showed that for men, the importance of personality increased from 28.67% in first marriage to 30.81% in remarriage. For women, it also rose from 27.74% in first marriage to 30.46% in remarriage. This shows that both men and women place more importance on personality when remarrying than when marrying for the first time.

This can be interpreted to mean that people seeking remarriage have experienced the importance of personality through their previous marriage, and therefore consider personality more carefully than those entering a first marriage.

After watching countless people meet, date, marry, and divorce over the past 20 years, I have often thought that personality is not always consistent or firmly fixed.

As we live, most of us probably have moments when we think, “Did I have this side of me?” It is difficult to be 100% certain about one’s own personality. If that is true even about ourselves, how much more difficult and uncertain is it to judge whether another person’s personality fits ours?

One remarried woman said she had liked her former husband because his bold and confident appearance made him seem reliable. But after living with him, she realized he was someone who had nothing behind him and only talked loudly.

People look closely at personality when they marry, yet many also divorce because of personality. That sometimes makes me wonder whether there is truly such a thing as a personality that fits perfectly as a spouse. Having compatible personalities may mean enduring each other. It may mean adjusting to each other. It may also mean simply becoming used to each other.

That is why, in relationships between men and women, personality must be viewed from many different angles.