You have a ‘type.’ So say your exes.

WASHINGTON — A study by a pair of psychologists at the University of Toronto confirms what dating histories have long suggested: When it comes to romantic partners, most people do have a “type,” personality-wise.

And the new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arrives at its conclusions in a slightly terrifying way: via interviews with hundreds of people’s romantic exes.

Psychologists have delved into the topic before, but much research relied on individuals’ self-reported experiences with their exes. That’s potentially a huge problem, as anyone who’s tried to speak in coldly rational terms about a former lover can probably attest. People may be inclined to cast former partners in a negative light, particularly vis-a-vis their current partners, muddying up the data.

The current study relies on the German Family Panel study, a representative survey of German adults that’s been ongoing since 2008. That survey involves interviews with both primary survey participants and their romantic partners. If a participant changes partners, the new arrival gets interviewed and that data added to the primary participant’s file.

Researchers evaluated current and former romantic partners on the Big Five personality inventory, an interview-based tool that social scientists have relied on for years. The inventory assigns scores on five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to new experience.

With those scores in hand, the researchers then compared current and former partners to see how similar (or different) they were. Crucially, they controlled for a couple of potentially confounding factors: since people tend to date people who are broadly similar to them, personality-wise, they controlled for the personality type of the primary survey participant. They also controlled for people’s tendency to characterize themselves in socially desirable terms, to ensure that any similarities weren’t simply an artifact of the way that all humans talk about themselves.

In the final analysis, they found “a significant degree of distinctive partner similarity, suggesting that there may indeed be a unique type of person each individual ends up with,” according to the study. If you’ve dated introverted and neurotic people in the past, you’re likely to date similar types in the future.

Interestingly, however, they found that this partner association was weaker, although still present, for people who scored high on extraversion and openness to new experience. If you are an outgoing person who loves trying new things, in other words, you are more likely to date people who are dissimilar to one another.