The heart is a clonely hunter
I’ve heard that we’re romantically attracted to people who look like us. Is that true? I don’t think any of my boyfriends have looked anything like me, but I have seen couples who look so similar they could be related. — Wondering
You can kinda see the merits of dating your doppelganger: “I’m looking for myself, but as someone else so I don’t always have to empty the dishwasher and scream out my own name in bed.”
There is this notion that opposites attract. Actually, the opposite often seems to be the case. According to research on “assortative mating,” people tend to pair up with partners who are physically similar to them — creating a matchy-matchy assortment — more often than would be expected through random chance.
To explore how much matchiness is appealing to us, social-personality psychologists R. Chris Fraley and Michael J. Marks used a computer to blend each research participant’s face into the face of a stranger of the opposite sex. They did this to increasing degrees, morphing in 0%, 22%, 32%, 39%, and 45% of the research participants’ features. Their research participants rated the strangers’ faces most sexually appealing with the 22% blend — that is, with just 22% of the participants’ own features mixed in.
In another morphing study, neuropsychologist Bruno Laeng and his colleagues mixed each participant’s face with that of their romantic partner — with 11%, 22%, and 33% blending. And again, 22% was picked consistently — suggesting that people find their romantic partners more attractive when they look just a bit like them.
Granted, it could be a coincidence that the exact same percentage — only 22% morphed — popped up in both studies. However, what’s noteworthy is that more resemblance didn’t lead to more attraction. This jibes with how some degree of similarity is genetically beneficial, increasing the likelihood of desirable traits showing up in partners’ children. (Tall plus tall equals tall.)
However, evolution seems to have installed a psychological mechanism to keep us from lusting after extremely similar partners, such as siblings and first cousins. Such close relatives are more likely to have the same rare recessive genes for a disease. A recessive gene when paired with a dominant gene (say, from a genetically very different partner) doesn’t express — that is, the person doesn’t develop the disease. But when two recessive genes get together … PARTAAAY!
As for you, though you say you haven’t resembled your partners, it’s possible that you actually have in subtle ways you didn’t notice. Back in 1903, researchers Karl Pearson and Alice Lee looked at 1,000 couples in the U.K. and found correlation in height, arm span, and left forearm length between husband and wife.