Couples grow to look alike? It’s an old wives’ tale...

Married couples grow to look increasingly alike as the years pass, or so we were supposed to believe.

But they don’t, scientists say – it is just that we tend to pair up with partners that resemble us in the first place.

a study reveals there is no evidence that spouses’ features become similar to each other as they age, pouring cold water on the old wives’ tale.

researchers at Stanford University in California analysed thousands of photographs of couples to work out whether, as has been suggested, it is not only their habits but also their looks that converge because of similar diets, lifestyles and daily routines.

Phd student Pin Pin Teamakorn and her colleague Michal Kosinski scoured Google, newspaper anniversary notices and genealogy websites to find pictures of couples taken at the start of marriage and again decades later. They compiled a database of 517 couples who had photos taken within two years of getting married and also between 20 and 69 years on.

To test the theory that partners’ faces grow more alike over time, the researchers showed volunteers a photo of a man or woman, then got them to compare this ‘target’ person to six others – one of whom was their spouse. They did this with the early pictures and the later ones.

Facial recognition software also performed the task.

The results, published in the journal Scientific reports, reveal no evidence of couples looking more alike as time elapsed. They did, however, look more alike at the start of their relationship than random pairs did.

This suggests we seek out partners who look similar to us, rather than growing physically alike over the years together.

The study says: ‘Spouses’ faces did not become more similar with time. in fact, according to human judges, spouses’ faces became slightly less similar with time.

‘This brings facial appearance in line with other traits – such as interests, personality, intelligence, attitudes, values and well-being – which show initial similarity but do not converge over time.’

The researchers now plan to investigate claims that people’s names can be predicted from their faces.