How similar are young romantic partners in their gender role attitudes? We challenge the idea that there is strong assortative mating on gender role attitudes: we give theoretical reasons for why people might choose a partner with different gender role attitudes, and test the idea empirically. To do so, we compare real couples to three types of ‘synthetic’ couples, couples that are re-matched in different ways: (1) re-matched to create maximum similarity in attitudes, (2) re-matched to create maximum similarity on other characteristics, education, age, and religiosity, and (3) randomly matched couples. We use pairfam-data from around 300 young (duration of relationship maximum three years) German couples. Results show that similarity in attitudes of real couples is much closer to randomly matched couples than to couples with maximum similarity in attitudes. We discuss potential consequences for couple stability and family formation.