Why we date people who look like us BRAD and Gwyn in the ’90s looked way too similar to be dating. But there’s a reason we’re attracted to people who look like us.
“I’VE decided your boyfriend kinda looks like he could be your brother,” my friend told me as she shovelled Maltesers in her mouth.
“I think it’s the blond hair thing that freaks me out.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had remarked on the similarities between my boyfriend and I. Sure, perhaps, if you wrote our key features down on paper — tall, blond, pale, blue-eyed, gangly, pale again — we’d sound like relatives. But in person? I just don’t see it.
My elder sister is told she looks just like her boyfriend all the time. My little brother looks a bit like his girlfriend, too. I have plenty of friends who look a hell of a lot like their partners. A former co-worker looks so much like her partner I really think they should look into an ancestry website just to be sure.
And, in case you missed the buzz on Twitter earlier this month, the world thinks actor Dylan Sprouse has a girlfriend who looks more like his twin than his actual twin.
That girlfriend is supermodel Barbara Palvin and the internet does have a point.
More than 100,000 people revelled in the pair’s likeness, before turning to other examples of celebrity couples who look, well, semi-related. Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, Alexis Bledel and Vincent Kartheiser, Brad Pitt and half the girlfriends he’s had since he was 17 …
The list goes on.
They even have the same hairdresser. Picture: Kevin Mazur Archive/WireImageSource:Supplied
As you read this right now, you’re sitting in one of two camps. The first is populated with people like me — the ones who are currently perspiring, thinking ‘my partner could totally pass as my cousin’. Then there’s the second group — filled with wide-eyed concern that anyone in the first group is in desperate need of psychological assessment.
Before any Camp A folk begin dialling the closest mental health professional, let it be known — some studies show that humans gravitate towards those who are similar to us on almost every level.
According to researchers who worked on a German study in 2016, we can more easily recognise emotions in faces similar to our own, affording us a greater “neural vocabulary” with those who look like us. This level of understanding and connection feeds into a mutual attraction and, ultimately, the foundation of a pretty successful relationship.
Not only are these two gorgeous together, they look like they match. Picture: Alex Berliner/Invision for the Television Academy/AP ImagesSource:AP
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