Sex, love, and work: What you do is not whom you want

Interest theory treats vocational interests as broad dispositions that shape behavior beyond the workplace, and the people–things dimension is among the more stable and sex-differentiated of them. We tested that generalization claim in the most demanding domain available. In seven countries, 1974 adults (968 men, 982 women) completed a forced-choice task indexing revealed preferences for five partner traits (i.e., physicality, compassion, competence, compatibility, and character) across long-term and short-term relationship contexts, and were classified by current sector, a proxy for orientation, as people-oriented ( n = 746), things-oriented ( n = 289), or abstract-oriented ( n = 710). Orientation, sex, and context were estimated in one model per trait. Occupational orientation had almost no bearing on partner choice. Choices for competence and compatibility were statistically equivalent between the people and things poles in both contexts, as were character choices in the long-term context, against a smallest effect size of interest of d = 0.20. The one association to emerge, more frequent compassion choices among people-oriented workers, was small, confined to men, and absent among women. Participants' sex and relationship context reorganized the same choices far more powerfully than orientation did. Vocational interests appear to organize what people do, not whom they want.