Intimate Rivalries: A Mixture of Pride and Envy

When Tesser later asked the defeated volunteers to take a seat in a room where the research assistant was already seated, Tesser found that people who were told the game was important seated themselves farther away from the "clever" competitor than did those who thought the game was trivial.

We want to be close to people who are stars, in other words -- just as long as they excel in something that is not important to us.

Does all this mean friends and couples who are doing the same kind of work are doomed to unhappiness? Of course not.

John Trojanowski and Virginia Lee, co-directors of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Pennsylvania, are an example of a couple who have successfully negotiated the psychological perils of being in the same profession. They clash regularly over matters of science and are tough on one another when it comes to work, but both believe they would be less successful if they were on their own -- and both are careful not to bring disagreements from their personal relationship into their work life, and vice versa.

Lee and Trojanowski said in an interview that although it appears to outsiders that they do everything together, they have actually figured out how to work in complementary ways. She takes the lead on bench science and biochemistry, and he does more of the clinical work and public outreach.

Tesser and Lockwood said that couples in the same line of work who are both successful and happy do what Trojanowski and Lee have done: They find different aspects in which to excel. If their skills complement each other, that's even better.

Trojanowski and Lee said they gravitated toward the domains where they felt the most skillful. But Tesser argued that just as unhappy couples and friends unconsciously fall into the trap of competing in the same domain, happy couples and friends unconsciously gravitate toward complementary ones.

In a revealing experiment, Tesser asked volunteers to do two tasks Let's say the volunteers found they were better at Task A than at Task B. When these volunteers were paired with friends who turned out to be even better at Task A than they were, Tesser found that the original volunteers unconsciously gravitated toward Task B as a way to avoid conflict and promote harmonious functioning.

"Partners pick their own domains of expertise," Lockwood agreed. " 'I will focus on success in athletics, and she will focus on our social life, and it is okay if I am successful in my domain, because it is no longer relevant to her.' If you pick your own domains, you don't have to make these comparisons."

The problem, she added, is that "there are some domains where you are not willing to cede expertise to the other person."