Values compatibility

Attraction and circumstance bring people together. What keeps them together is usually described as values compatibility – whether two people’s deep preferences align as they move through life. But this overlooks a key dynamic: a relationship itself can become something we value, reshaping the very compatibility that enabled its formation. This holds for friends, lovers, coworkers, and to some extent families. So what are values? What makes them compatible? And how can we use this understanding to relate to one another with more intention and appreciation?

What are values?

Values are our differentiating, deep-rooted preferences. They range from the temperamental to the ethical; from needing routine to feel grounded, to prioritizing loyalty over self-interest. What unifies them is not their moral weight, but their reliability under tradeoff: when something has to give, the same thing gives again and again.

Most of us seek water when we’re thirsty, so a preference for hydration isn’t particularly differentiating. But silence vs stimulation, novelty vs routine, optimization vs ease, rootedness vs mobility… these reveal something, because they lead to different decisions and ultimately different lives. The sharpest way to express a value is often as a choice between competing goods: “I care more about honoring commitments than about keeping options open.”

Deep-rooted here means durable and salient: preferences that persist across years and surface almost daily. For example, I’m most productive in complete silence: no music, no background noise. I wish I were more flexible, but this has been true for decades.

Durable is not necessarily permanent. Values can shift – sometimes because a new context reveals a different priority, and sometimes through deliberate cultivation. Children outgrow their toys, and teenagers outgrow their rebellion. Adults might value income over comfort until a certain level of wealth. And, importantly, a relationship itself can become something we value: what starts as circumstantial coexistence can grow into something you actively prioritize, reshaping other tradeoffs in the process.

Compatibility is contextual

A value only becomes visible when a context forces a tradeoff. You don’t know whether you value career over location until you’re offered a great job in a city you’d rather not live in. You cannot be entirely sure whether you value honesty over harmony until telling the truth will cost you something. Outside of such moments, values are just hypotheses.

Two people’s values are compatible in a given context when their preferred choices can coexist – either because they agree, because their preferences are complementary, or because one or both can accommodate the difference without resentment. Two people who both insist on leading will clash. A leader paired with someone who values support can thrive.

But here’s the complication: the weight assigned to any value isn’t fixed. When you’ve built something with someone – shared history, ways of navigating conflict, deep familiarity – the relationship itself becomes a value that competes with everything else. The tradeoffs you’re willing to make with this person differ from those you’d make with someone new. This means compatibility is not just about whether two sets of values align, but about whether the relationship becomes valuable enough to both people that they’re willing to accommodate misalignments that would have been dealbreakers at the start.

Values compatibility, then, is not a static property of two people. It is better understood as a probability-weighted assessment across the contexts they are likely to share, with the added complexity that the relationship itself changes what matters. A couple is “compatible” to the extent that, across the futures they are likely to face together, either their values lead to compatible choices or the relationship becomes valuable enough that both are willing to examine and shift other priorities. Two people might be perfectly aligned in their current circumstances and badly misaligned in a future that is entirely plausible: a job loss, a health crisis, a move, a child. Whether that future breaks them depends not just on their pre-existing values, but on whether the relationship has become worth the work of navigating the misalignment.

What we call a “core” value is not a special category. It is simply a value likely to be tested across a wide range of probable futures. A preference for Thai food over Italian matters only when you’re deciding on Tuesday dinner. A preference for transparency over self-protection matters in almost every relationship, in almost every plausible future. The former feels peripheral and the latter feels core, not because one is deeper in some abstract sense, but because one shows up in far more scenarios. Even core values, though, exist in a hierarchy that can shift when the relationship itself becomes something both people value highly.

Constraints

Constraints narrow the decision space, crowding out value conflicts by replacing them with more urgent shared demands. Parenting is the clearest example. Two people who disagree about how to spend surplus time or money may never feel that friction while raising children, because parenting dominates every decision. Remove the shared project – the children leave – and the misalignments surface. Empty-nest divorces are often less about values changing than about constraints lifting.

But constraints do something else: they create the conditions under which relationships can become valuable. The shared project of parenting doesn’t just mask incompatibility – it creates interdependence and shared purpose that can become valuable in itself. When the constraint lifts, what determines whether the relationship survives isn’t only whether the underlying values were compatible all along. It’s whether the relationship itself became valuable enough during those constrained years that both people are willing to renegotiate how they spend their time and money, rather than simply discovering they wanted different things.

Historically, much of our values compatibility has been enforced by external constraints. We were close with our neighbors because our social opportunities were geographically bounded. We tolerated difficult coworkers because switching jobs was costly. These relationships worked, even if they worked for reasons that had little to do with values that would hold up across other futures. But they also worked, sometimes, because the constraint lasted long enough that the relationships became worth preserving for their own sake.

Buffers

Buffers do the opposite of constraints: they absorb value differences so the tradeoff never arises. Technology is one kind of buffer. A generation ago, one person sleeping hot and the other cold was a nightly negotiation. Today, a dual-zone mattress pad eliminates the conflict entirely. The values haven’t changed, but the friction has vanished. Money is another. One partner wants to live in a city; the other wants their children to have access to top-tier schools. With enough income, private school resolves it. Take away the financial buffer, and the same couple faces a genuine collision – urban life vs educational priority, with no way to have both.

The question is what the buffer was doing all those years. Was it merely hiding an incompatibility that would inevitably surface if circumstances changed? Or was it creating space for the relationship to become valuable enough that, when the buffer disappears, both people are willing to make accommodations they wouldn’t have made at the start? A couple that loses their financial buffer might discover they were never really compatible. Or they might discover that the relationship has become important enough that they’re willing to revisit their priorities in ways that would have felt impossible when they were first dating.

Technology and wealth are changing this. Many relationships are becoming optional as the constraints that required them fade. And the relationships that remain are increasingly buffered from friction, which means they may be less tested than they appear. It is easy to mistake frictionless coexistence for compatibility. But it’s equally easy to underestimate how much the buffered years might have mattered, creating the right conditions to grow a relationship into something valuable enough to weather harder terrain later.

Clarity as a practice

Compatibility is not something we discover once, but something we navigate continuously – under uncertainty, across changing circumstances, with incomplete information. The clearer we are about what we value, the better we can distinguish compatibility that has been tested from compatibility that has merely been buffered or enforced by constraints.

But clarity about our own values is only part of the picture. We also need clarity about what the relationship itself has become. If two people can stay engaged in that inquiry together – examining their values, acknowledging when the relationship is valuable enough to warrant difficult accommodations, noticing when it isn’t, being honest about what constraints and buffers might be hiding – then the dialogue itself becomes an expression of compatibility.