Chemistry and Compatibility

Read time: 2 mins

Sometimes you can literally feel the power of a connection with another person. It envelopes you, they cloud your mind, send shockwaves through your soul and tingle your fingertips. Throughout the history of story-telling, lust, passion and love have all had this physical component.

It’s interesting that the words we use to describe the passionate side of our relationships are fundamentally physical – we often talk about relationships using physical words. And yet, the words we use to describe our actual connection tend to be far less physical. When we consider our friends for example, the words we use are far more likely to centre on feelings. Instead of sparks, we talk about soul mates. We identify levels of affection, trust, importance and kindness and often abandon reference to the physical completely.

*Shakespeare talking about a relationship as if it were a physical thing such as food. Note the physical language – being “driven on by the flesh” suggests a relationship high in chemistry. It’s also worth noting the specific character who is speaking here…

And yet, common wisdom suggests that lasting relationships tend to require a healthy dose of both.

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k and Everything is F**ked: A Book About Hope, has some interesting thoughts on the topic.

He defines the raw physicality of a relationship as chemistry and the abstract emotional side as compatibility. His definition provides an interesting perspective to our relationships. Below is a matrix inspired by his work, that compares chemistry in a relationship with compatibility, along with some suggestions about what each of these combinations can create:

This matrix is interesting and provides a simplistic and high level perspective to considering existing or new connections. However, it misses an important factor – time.

Both axis can fluctuate over time, with life events and children being a famous example. New colleagues and old friends can commonly flutter between high chemistry and high combability, and vice versa, based on something simple like proximity, careers or even hobbies. Meeting new people with new chemistry or compatibility can throw the whole balance into flux too.

In the appropriate words of Judith Viorst:

For more of Mark Manson’s work, you can subscribe via his website. His newsletter is great reading for anyone interested in this sort of content: https://markmanson.net/