We hear all the time that opposites attract, and we might actually believe that to be true. However, the more we find ourselves dating, the more we might find ourselves realizing that our exes and significant others look really familiar, almost eerily so. Then we realize that our significant others have a pattern of looking just like us and we get a little worried about our own sanity levels. I’ve been through this myself, actually. I dated a guy for a month who had the same pale skin and dark curly hair that I did. To make matters worse, I was obsessed with blue contact lenses at the time, and my brand made it so they were the exact same color of his eyes. People thought we were twins and would side eye us all the time, and I never understood why until I looked at pictures a few months later. It was equal parts horrifying and hilarious. Not only is my experience a common one, it’s actually rooted in psychology. Here’s why we find ourselves not only dating people who look like us, but why we end up looking alike over time, according to science and psychology.
There’s no reason to freak out about this. A lot of this comes down to what we know. What we know best is ourselves. “When you have a face that looks more like you, you tend to trust it more and think it looks more cooperative,” Tony Little, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland told USA Today.
The numbers prove this. Emma Pierson is a statistician that studied one million of eHarmony’s matches made by their algorithm, and she found that people are astonishingly interested in other people who look like them. For example, I have brown hair, so I’m more likely to find myself attracted to someone with brown hair.
People find qualities attractive that they have themselves. According to Pierson, who sat down with FiveThirtyEight: “All women prefer taller men, but tall women display a stronger preference for tall men.” This isn’t often the case, but it’s the case for enough people that this phenomenon is a thing.
Pierson’s findings have been backed up by science. Research suggests that our brains process images that are familiar to us faster and more easily. People love familiarity so much, it’s not uncommon that when people get married, they have alliterative names. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are a good example of this. I also know of two couples that share an initial: one couple is made up of two people whose first names begin with R, and the other couple have last names that each begin with S. This is a real thing, guys.
This also comes from a place of narcissism. We’re actually attracted to faces that look like our own because we like looking at our own faces. One study morphed pictures of their subjects with pictures of strangers and asked the subjects to judge what faces were the most attractive. A lot of the subjects picked the picture that was most merged with their own face as the most attractive one.
Luckily, this is a subconscious thing. Remember the story I told you earlier, where finding out my ex looked like me actually freaked me out? That’s a normal response: once we’re reminded that the person we find attractive looks like us, the spell is broken and we find it weird. That should make you feel better.
Lots of studies have shown that straight couples tend to flock together, at least genetically. It turns out that a lot of heterosexual couples will end up partnering up with people who have a similar DNA structure to them. This got taken a step further with one study: identical twins ended up choosing mates that looked like them, and their non-related spouses ended up looking a lot like each other, as well.
We might be looking at outside features to see an inside connection. For many of us, our personalities are written on our faces. We might be seeking out people who resemble us physically because we’re seeing their outside features as a way to gauge their inside characteristics, which we’re subconsciously thinking are a lot like our own. This sometimes ends up not being fair as some of us are blessed with the ever present resting bitch face or resting nice face, but psychology is psychology.
Some physical characteristics are determined by our body chemistry. For example, if you have high testosterone, you’re more likely to have a strong face shape (like a strong chin or jaw) and a strong, dominant personality. Also, our smiles and our eyes reveal a lot about us. Are our eyes playful, or are they serious? People pick up on these things. “Smiles are important social cues that may tell us whether or not someone is friendly and eyes are also a traditional focus of attention,” Tony Little told LiveScience.
A study in 2005 looked into this further. They found 85 married couples and asked participants to rate their faces for perceived personality traits. They were operating under the idea that “choosing a partner on the basis of similar personality could lead to facial similarity in partners in terms of apparent personality.” They were right.
Not only do we pick people who look like us, we grow to look even more like each other. Have you ever looked at an older couple and found that they look really alike, almost scarily alike? There’s a reason for that: the longer a couple is together, the more their looks actually converge on each other and make them look even more alike than they already did.
University of Michigan psychologist Robert Zajonc did a study on this phenomenon. He analyzed photos taken of newlyweds and compared them to pictures that were taken 25 years later, and asked the study participants to match the photos according to their facial similarities. While the couples involved didn’t always look alike, a lot of participants thought that they looked alike later on in the relationships.
This phenomenon is due to a few things. For one, when you’re a couple and you live together, you often share the same diet. While that’s a factor, what’s even more of a factor is a couple’s lived experiences that they share together. People who live together often mimic each other’s facial expressions empathetically, especially if they’re going through the same things, like parenting, financial ups and downs, and other things. Those things can actually shape our facial structure and how we age.
While we might be a little creeped out by this, those of us who find ourselves on dates with dopplegangers might find themselves happier in the long run. Zajonc’s study found that the couples who were happier in the long run were the couples who looked most similar. That sounds kind of weird when you think about it, and it might not be all the way true, but the correlation is there in this experiment, and it might even be true in your own life.
In the end, this phenomenon reveals our own biases and explains a big mystery of dating. This is actually kind of reassuring for a lot of us. Sure, we find ourselves gravitating to faces that look like our own, but if nothing else, ending up with someone who looks like you not only shows that we subconsciously find ourselves more attractive than we think we do, but we might also be happier for it in the long run.
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