Česky
Slovensky
English
Polski
Deutsch
Español
Magyar
Italiano
Português
NederlandsSaturday, half past nine in the morning. Erin has a list of everything that has to get done today spread out on the kitchen table; Mark is buttering his third slice of toast without hurrying. Twenty minutes later a sentence flies through the kitchen that both of them know by heart: "You can only relax when everything is ticked off."
That argument is not about the toast or the list. It is about pace, and pace is one of the few things in a person that stays similar from childhood to retirement. Which is why the same scene repeats in the same couple twelve years running, only with the scenery swapped out.
What each temperament brings into a couple
The division into the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic and the melancholic is over two thousand years old and originally rested on the idea of bodily fluids. Measurable content came only from Hans Eysenck, who showed in the 1960s that the old foursome maps rather well onto two axes: how far a person is turned outward, and how easily their emotional footing wobbles. The sanguine comes out of that as a stable extravert, the choleric as an unstable extravert, the phlegmatic as a stable introvert and the melancholic as an unstable introvert.
For a relationship that yields two practical questions. How fast does the other person react when something goes wrong, and how long does that reaction last? Most misunderstandings between partners can be translated into one of the two.
Sanguine: needs things to do together
For them a relationship lives on what you do together. They plan the weekend, bring new acquaintances home and lift the mood even after a miserable day. When nothing new happens for two months they get restless, and that goes for a relationship with objectively nothing wrong with it.
Serious conversations tend to have a short lifespan with them. They steer them toward something lighter before they start to hurt, so the other side occasionally feels they never quite got through. A promise made in enthusiasm may also not survive to next week.
Choleric: the argument as a way of solving things
They name the problem out loud and immediately. They are not out to beat their partner, they want the thing settled tonight; an unresolved matter burns them more than a sharp exchange of views.
The trouble is what is left after the explosion. The choleric is over it within twenty minutes and genuinely cannot understand why the other one still has that look on their face. The sentence they let out in the heat of it, meanwhile, keeps running in their partner for a week. The whole character with its blind spots is covered in the portrait of the choleric.
Phlegmatic: calm at almost any price
This is the one who turns down the volume in an argument, does not drag up old grievances and gets through the rougher periods without packing a suitcase. They are easy to live with long term, because they do not make drama out of things that are not drama.
The price is paid elsewhere. They swallow disagreement for so long that it turns into a quiet distance, and then out of nowhere the partner learns that for a year they have disagreed with something the two of them supposedly agreed on. Their silence is not agreement but a reluctance to argue.
Melancholic: a long memory for small things
They take the relationship seriously, go deep and notice even what was not said: the tone of voice, the hesitation, a hand placed differently. They keep a handful of close people for years and go a long way for them.
At the same time they replay everything. An unfortunate remark from Friday dinner is still circling in them on Sunday afternoon, even though the other person forgot it over dessert. They can forgive; forgetting is harder, so a pile of small things eventually turns into one big topic.
Ten pairings and what usually sparks in them
Temperament scores do not add up, and no table predicts whether a couple will last. It is useful for something else: most couples keep arguing about the same thing, and once you can name that "same thing", it loses part of its power over you. When did you last have a fight about something you already worked through last year?
| Pairing | What works well between them | Where it usually grinds |
|---|---|---|
| Choleric + melancholic | Decisiveness meets thoroughness, so things get finished fast and properly at the same time | A sharp word in the heat of it that one forgets within an hour and the other carries for a month |
| Choleric + phlegmatic | One pulls, the other damps; in a crisis this pair works surprisingly well | The more one pushes, the more the other withdraws into silence and pretends to agree |
| Choleric + sanguine | Plenty of energy, plenty of action, arguments without long sulking | Both talk, nobody listens; promises pile up faster than they are kept |
| Two cholerics | They understand each other's pace and directness, nothing settles inside them | A fight over the last word and escalation from zero to a hundred within two sentences |
| Sanguine + phlegmatic | One brings the plans, the other the calm; they barely argue at all | A household on autopilot: nobody deals with the unpleasant things until something is on fire |
| Sanguine + melancholic | Lightness meets depth; one gets them out of the house, the other brings the serious conversation | A different need for people around them, and a sense in one of them that what matters keeps getting postponed |
| Two sanguines | A rich social life and the ability to shake off any blow | Unfinished things pile up; paperwork, finances and plans get closed by nobody |
| Phlegmatic + melancholic | Calm, consideration and a home you can breathe in | Decisions postponed until time or a stranger makes them |
| Two phlegmatics | Minimal conflict and high resistance to shocks from outside | Years of comfortable routine in which nothing either of them once wanted comes true |
| Two melancholics | Understanding without explanation and a relationship that can take a lot | Shared brooding turns in a bad period into a spiral with no way out |
Most people, moreover, are not a pure type. A streak of a second temperament joins the main one, so a choleric with a melancholic streak argues quite differently from a choleric with a sanguine streak. How the pairs assemble inside one person is shown in the overview of temperament combinations.
Do opposites really attract?
Folk wisdom claims both things at once. Opposites attract, and birds of a feather flock together. At the start of a relationship the first version has the upper hand: calm feels like a refuge to a choleric, and the choleric's drive gets the phlegmatic off the sofa. Five years later the same difference becomes the main subject of every other Sunday.
John Gottman, who filmed couples in his laboratory from the 1970s and then followed how their relationships turned out, came up with a distinction that shifts this question onto different ground. He summarized it in a book published in 1999. He divides disagreements into solvable and perpetual. The perpetual ones grow out of differences in character and needs and do not disappear even after ten years of joint effort, because there is no way for them to disappear. According to Gottman they make up roughly 69 percent of all conflicts in a couple.
The most interesting part is that happy and unhappy couples barely differ in the number of such disputes. They differ in what they do with them. Some can talk about their eternal topic with humor and with regard for why it matters to the other person; others get stuck in it and every round is harder than the last. So no combination of temperaments is doomed and none is a guarantee.
What predicts satisfaction better than matching characters? Agreement on what you consider important. How much money gets spent and how much saved, whether there will be children, how much space work gets, how the two sets of parents are handled. Two people with very different paces will settle this without difficulty; two equally attuned melancholics with opposite views on money will have a problem even after the wedding.
Before you start assessing your partner, it helps to know where you stand yourself. Our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes; it is not couples counseling and not a diagnostic tool, more an approximate piece of self-knowledge that makes it easier to talk about what actually bothers whom.
Three points of friction almost every couple knows
Fast versus slow. One wants to decide over dinner, the other needs to sleep on it. The choleric and the sanguine read that delay as indifference; the melancholic and the phlegmatic feel a pressure under which no decision can be made. It helps to agree on a deadline instead of an answer: "We'll decide by seven tomorrow." The fast one has a date, the slow one has peace, and the line "you never get around to anything" loses its footing.
Loud versus quiet. When one raises their voice the other goes silent, and that is when it really starts. Silence provokes a loud partner more than resistance does. What works is a pause with an end, not without one: "I'll come back to this in half an hour." That half hour is not an escape, just the time it takes for the alarm in the body to drop. Concrete guidance for this kind of situation is in the piece on how to get along with a choleric.
Plans versus quiet. The sanguine has two visits lined up on Saturday morning; the phlegmatic was looking forward to going nowhere. The solution is not a compromise in the middle that pleases nobody, but a split: one day full, the other empty, fixed in advance. It sounds boring and it works better than improvising.
A few more small things that save a lot of unnecessary rounds in daily life:
- With a partner who forgets, send the agreement in one sentence as a message. That is not distrust, it is prevention.
- Deliver criticism one item at a time and without an audience, especially with a melancholic. Nobody hears a list of three complaints at once as factual feedback.
- Ask directly. "What would you do differently?" pulls more out of a quiet partner than "Do you agree?", which only gets a nod.
- Tiredness and stress magnify every difference, because under pressure people behave more sharply than usual. What that looks like in each type is described in the piece on temperament and stress.
When it is no longer about temperament
Temperament explains form, not content. That somebody speaks loudly, flares up fast and cools down just as fast is a description of style. Humiliation, threats, checking a phone, three days of silence as punishment, or anything that leaves the other person afraid, does not belong in the same category. The sentence "I'm just a choleric" is not an explanation but an excuse note, and in this case it does not apply.
Long-term withdrawal is worth reading with similar care. A phlegmatic needs quiet, but if nothing interests them for months, they do not go out among people and they no longer enjoy even what they used to enjoy, this is no longer about character and a professional is in order. The same goes for a melancholic who cannot sleep over one sentence several nights in a row.
There is a simple test of whether this is still about a difference in pace or already about something else. Can you talk about it outside an argument, on a calm Monday evening, and end up somewhere specific? If every such attempt slides into another round, it is usually not a question of temperament, and one session with a couples therapist saves a year of arguing at home.