Jun 28, 2024 12:00:00

Research supports the idea that people tend to date people who look similar to them

The good news for people who are so in love with their partner's looks that they tend to think, 'Maybe I'm not good enough for them?' is that it turns out that people are quite accurate in assessing their own and the opposite sex's physical attractiveness, and both men and women tend to choose marriage or dating partners who are a good match for themselves.

Dyadic secondary meta-analysis: Attractiveness in mixed-sex couples - ScienceDirect

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886924001909

We date, marry people who are attractive as we are, new analysis finds - News - University of Florida
https://news.ufl.edu/2024/06/attractiveness-ratings/

In this study, a research team led by Gregory D. Webster of the Department of Psychology at the University of Florida reanalyzed a 1988 research paper that analyzed the correlations of attraction between couples.

The study was a groundbreaking

meta-analysis that pooled data from 27 different studies involving a total of about 1,300 couples, but in the decades since, psychologists have accumulated much more knowledge about romantic relationships and developed new tools to analyze that data. These tools may be able to provide new insights that were not apparent at the time.

'The ways in which men and women meet and assess attractiveness may have changed over the years, such as the rise of online dating, where people are first matched by a photograph, but the fundamentals of what people consider attractive have remained consistent across cultures and eras,' Webster said.

The research data used in previous literature mainly involved couples rating their own physical attractiveness and then having a third party objectively rate the couple's physical beauty.

When Webster and her team reanalyzed the data, they found that not only were men and women accurate in assessing their own attractiveness, but couples also tended to have similar views of their own beauty: For example, men who rated themselves as good-looking were more likely to date women who shared the same self-assessment.

The meta-analysis also included data from studies of young couples as well as studies of older couples who had been together for many years, allowing the team to look at how couples' self-evaluations change at different stages in their relationships.

The study found that men tend to become more accurate in judging their own attractiveness the longer they are in a relationship, possibly because as they get older, they lose the overconfidence of their younger years and are able to assess themselves more accurately.

'Maybe men are being more pragmatic because there aren't many people who become more attractive over time,' Webster said.