Have you ever looked at a couple who has stayed together happily for years? Did you notice that they start looking like each other over the years? If your answer to both these questions is a ‘Yes’, then let us tell you that actually you have seen something that happens scientifically. That’s true!
Some married couples do start looking like each other when they have shared numerous experiences of life together. And by looking like each other, we don’t mean that they start wearing the same kind of clothes, what we mean is that their facial features start resembling. In this article, we are about to tell you the scientific reasons as to why all this happens. So if you had wondered why your grandpa and grandma looked like siblings, then you are about the find the answers right here.
To start with, most of us tend to settle down with people who look similar to us. In a study done in 2014, it was found that white people mostly pick up partners who have the similar DNA.
phenomenon which makes us choose people who are like us is actually known as assortative mating, a theory which basically suggests that people who have similar phenotypes tend to date each other more frequently. We may date people who are opposite to us thinking that ‘opposites attract’, but when it comes to settling down with someone to have a family, we choose people who are like us in some manner or the other. In fact, we all have this subconscious desire that our children should look like us, and when we have a partner with whom we share similar features, the chances of having kids that look like us increase substantially.
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Scientists are also of the view that we tend to search for people who resemble our opposite-sex parent. What they mean by this is that a guy will try to find a girl who sort of looks like his mother and the girl will try to find a man who looks like her father. This study also said that if our parents were not young when they had us, then we will choose a partner who is older than us in age.
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The now-late psychologist Robert Zajonc from the University of Michigan had done a study in 1987, which tells a lot about why couples look alike. Zajonc compared photographs of couples that were taken at the time of their marriage to the photographs taken 25 years later, and he actually found that even if there were no similarities in facial features in the starting years, couples did start looking like each other after staying together for 25 years. Another interesting fact that came from this study was that the more happiness a couple reported in their marriage, the more their facial features resembled.
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Zajonc believed that because two people share similar life experiences, there are chances that they will form the same type of lines on the face. When a couple spends all those happy and sad times together, the wrinkles will be formed in the same places and thus, they start looking more like each other.
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When couples live a happy life together, they start mirroring the body language and habits of each other. Zajonc also talked about the theory of emotional face-mirroring in this regard. According to him, we imitate the behavior of people who are mostly around us. And if we mimic a partner for a long duration, then that could even lead to the reshaping of our face.
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The functioning of our immune system depends on many factors, but the two main factors are our eating habits and our exercise routine. Scientists are of the view that when couples have similar eating habits and exercise routines, they also tend to have similar immune systems. So, by staying together for a long period of time, we not only reshape our facial features and body language, but also the system which keeps our body running, together.
To think of it, isn’t it amazing that after spending all those years with our special someone, we start looking like the love of our life? It feels like even nature makes sure that true love gets what it deserves, the proof that those partners were indeed made for each other.
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