Do people who marry really have the same level of differentiation of self?

In a test of M. Bowen's hypothesis that people marry at the same level of differentiation of self, both members of 36 heterosexual couples completed the Personal Authority in the Family System Questionnaire (PAFS-Q). The similarity of the actual couples' scores was compared with the similarity of randomly formed couples across 1,000 Monte Carlo replications of the pseudocouple methodology for each of 7 PAFS-Q variables. Several indexes of couple similarity averaged across the replications revealed that the members of the actual couples were more similar than the members of the pseudocouples on just 1 of the spousal measures and none of the measures of intergenerational relationships. In general, these findings do not support the Bowen hypothesis.