My terrible couples experiment so far.
I made a household of four newly wed couples who have opposite traits, conversation and personality interests for the most part to see how that would turn out.
It's not always all three traits being opposite, since there's not that many strong opposites and I still try and create a bit of a fitting personality for each Sim, but always two opposing traits.
There's the goth guy with the happy English country girl. He's gloomy, macabre and non-commitical. She's cheerful, loyal and a goofball. I picked their preferences to match.
Their only issues have been due to automatic flirting, which I think all eight sims have done, even the loyal girl. I forgot to customise any romantic boundaries in CAS so they are all default in that. I don't think it ever was any real flirting either, just stuff vaguely interpreted as flirting since the game has a very loose definition of it it seems. Their different personalities don't seem to make them much mismatched, it's weird he even gets sad about her cheating and never got the want to break up with her despite being non-commitical.
There's also the bad guy and the good girl. He's shady, materialistic and evil. She's good, generous and an idealist. Again with matching preferences.
These two proved to be the worst couple of them all, truly hating each other, and their talks about fears about their relationship never went well and both had that fear. She was the one that got the want for a divorce, I do follow their wants in this. With the relationship on both sides as negative as possible without any meddling on my part, it is weird that both where sad for two days about that divorce. I especially feel like an evil sim should not be sad for that long about it.
There's also the proper, neat active guy with the lazy cringe slob girl. They seem to do pretty well together, only problems have been due to some vaguely defined flirting happening that I didn't even notice happening. Might be due to how underdesigned both the lazy and slob traits are. Cringe too I suppose considering how often she feels embarrassed.
And finally, there's the flirty outgoing geek guy and the jealous unflirty paranoid girl.
They aren't doing good either, kind of living past each other really. They where the first to have issues, both seem to have fears about the relationship. But since she got into meditating, she's doing pretty great. I got her that after she got a burnout at work AND a rival, was unbalanced too. Neither have wanted a divorce yet, despite pretty negative relationship scores. She did want to declare him an enemy for a day or two but I didn't do that. Not yet at least, I might if it keeps showing up.
My rule is that couples only get a divorce if one of them wants it.
I'm not using cheats, the house has a shared living room/kitchen and beside that four apartments that's basically a bedroom with a bathroom, the bedroom big enough to have some skill objects for their work. Every time a sim gets a promotion, I buy an upgrade of an object or something new for in that sim's apartment.
After the divorce I put an extra living space on top of the building that still had one floor, she moved there with all her stuff after crashing on the couch of another couple a night or two. She did not get that room until she got a promotion.
Not sure yet what I will do long term with it, currently they are building up funds, learning skills, advancing careers while having relationship drama as well. I think eventually I'll have couples that seem to really have found stability move out to find their own space to maybe have children, with such opposite parents that might be an interesting follow up experiment.
