Psychology Today |Relationships|Mating|”Why So Many Couples Look Alike” “It’s more than a meme:Many romantic partners really could pass for siblings, and plenty more couples grow to look increasingly alike over time. The reasons why illuminate what people actually look for in a mate” By Karen Wu, Ph.D.
Read Psychology Today for all the details
Summary by 2244
Image from buzzfeed.com
Connecting with others on social media it certainly has struck us how often engagement and wedding snapshots show a couple with remarkably similar looks. Not only body type but actual similar looking faces or faces that strongly resemble one of their parents. Fast forward to reading this Psychology Today article which, unbeknownst to us, highlights this fact but also notes that “the phenomenon has gained so much attention that “Siblings or Dating?” Games have started popping up on social media platforms.”
What’s this all about?
Some factors of bringing similars together are apparently well-known. These include “a same-race preference in dating”...and similar body type-”weight, height and body-mass-index.” One can make the case for these factors as supporting the idea that such similarity is “a signal of shared lifestyles.” But if these selection biases “don’t fully explain why so many partners share strong facial similarity” then what does?
Implicit egotism
“Many people are attracted to their own face, and, by extension, to the faces that resemble theirs.” Elegant studies have evaluated this revealing that notable lookalike images, unrecognizable to the individual being surveyed, were preferred in the unconscious mode but were not when the images were shown in the context of research “about incest and discovering ‘how attractive people find faces that are designed to resemble genetic relatives such as parents, brothers and sisters’...”
Familiarity effect
Such an obvious effect is explained that “we will tend to like [images that look like us] simply “due to the ease of processing it: to the brain, easy means pleasant.” Conversely, in such an evaluation, “more distinctive faces were rated as less attractive by people than more familiar ones.”
Assortative mating
How do we select a mate in a world where some individuals are “viewed as the most attractive?” Researchers found evidence of mate selection depending on at least two factors. One regarding a search for the very best (good all around genes) and the other seeking some level of “self-resemblance” (self-seeking). Simply put, attractive men are more likely to pair up with attractive women and “couples generally tend to resemble each other in facial features.” Such mating of individuals with similar characteristics obviously happens more frequently than random mating.
Sexual imprinting
People may seek out a partner that resembles a parent. This process is known as sexual imprinting is the idea that one’s “parents [may] model what their future partner should look like.”
Emotional closeness with parents
Of course we know, it’s not all about “looks.” Researchers have shown that in heterosexual women if they were emotionally close to their fathers they preferred “self-resembling male faces” but not so self-resembling female faces even if they were emotionally close to their mothers. Such an association has not been established in heterosexual men.
Similar social judgements
We may select mates based on our impressions that their personalities are similar to our own. “It may not always be a matter of physical attraction” but we may deduce, correctly or not, “based on their looks.”
Empathic mimicry
While we may not look similar in the beginning of a relationship we may come to “feel similar emotions and make similar facial expressions” as time goes on. Such alignment may lead to “similar facial musculature, wrinkling and aging patterns.
Concluding
The author Karen Wu, concludes “Pairing up with a partner who has similar physical features might be a way to be with someone who’s uniquely attractive to us-as well as similar in personality, lifestyle, and emotional expressiveness. The research suggest we may end up happier together as well.”
Comments