Science Explains Why Some Married Couples Start To Look Alike Over The Years

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.

1We choose the familiar

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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2We look for people resembling our parents

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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3The years that couples spend together

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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