i have a number of friends with forceful personalities, and with one exception all of their relationships are with people without forceful personalities. i've always found this very surprising, since, as a person with a forceful personality, i have always, always been much more interested in girls with forceful personalities. not necessarily personalities similar to mine, but people who have well-defined impulses and dreams and thought patterns.
in principle, having exactly one forceful personality in a relationship seems to be optimal. with two, you're butting heads all the time; with zero, you end up in a bad feedback spiral of wallowing. but if you were the sort of person who throws yourself out there, who throws yourself into conversations and life and whatever, i don't understand how you could be happy with someone who didn't. (i understand that these types of throwing yourself into things aren't exactly tied together in a bundle.)
i once dated this girl who was very, very quiet in groups. and it always made me uncomfortable. because we would show up to dinner, or whatever, and i would be my usual talkative self, and she would just be sitting there, perfectly comfortable, perfectly amiably smiling, but not really adding anything. it's not clear to me why these 1-forceful relationships don't have these problems. the issue only seems to intensify when one is considering life partners. as a forceful personality, you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone, and let's face it, most pair-bonds cloister themselves off from their group of friends at the latest when they have kids. and you're not going to want that person to be real, energetic, interesting, variegated, into the same kind of music you are?
but anyway i'm sort of digressing. the other thing that baffles me about this is that one could be content to live one's life with a person so different from oneself, period. this ties into the general question about relationships: what's more important, similarity or complementarity? at this point in my life i'm wholly on the similarity side, having just gone through a failed relationship more complementary than similar. sure, on a day to day basis trivial complementarity is useful (e.g. one person likes to drive, one person likes to wash dishes, one person likes to wake up in the night for feedings, one person likes to change diapers, etc..), but i found that in a complementary relationship i always felt insecure, because i simply didn't have a great grasp of what she was thinking (though admittedly there may have been other root causes of our problems.) her motivations and interactions were so different from mine that they didn't come close to fitting into my schema. we talked, of course, about these things, but my intuition never really got why she put herself into the personality that she did (a forceful personality, to be sure.)
whereas when one is in a similarity-based relationship, things are easy. you always know what's going on; you always get what's going on. of course, this isn't really a panacea; you can still have problems or asymmetries with all sorts of things. but it's hard for me to imagine that a relationship where two people are very similar, of equal intelligence, and attracted to each other would fail. obviously i haven't mentioned my most important aspect of a relationship, which i've termed "conversational dynamism," but just from a life-based standpoint similarity seems clearly optimal (and of course highly correlated to conversational dynamism.)
especially because fundamentally i love myself and can't think of why i would want a girl who isn't like me. but i feel like this isn't random; i feel like it's a tautology that all forceful personalities should be this way. and so with the exception of matt and susan, i'm surprised that my forceful friends find their way into long-term non-forceful relationships.