People often joke that, despite our best efforts not to, we grow up to mirror the habits and behaviors of our parents. Unfortunately, this age-old concept now stretches even further, and it may be affecting romantic relationships.
![Why Humor Is Sexy: A Zoosk Study [EXPERT]](http://images.tangomag.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/node-full/images/atabar.jpg "Why Humor Is Sexy: A Zoosk Study [EXPERT]")
In honor of National Humor Month, Zoosk and I decided to test your funny bone and see just how important laughter is in relationships. Users of the romantic social network gave us insight into how much humor tickles their fancy for dates, mates and love. Below are the three most surprising humor study results and tips on how you can use this information to your flirting advantage.
This year, we found out that men are more vain than women, deep voices make women pay attention, and that men prefer to date women who have been dumped. Here, we've rounded up dating 11 studies from 2011 with weird, unexpected results.
After getting together with someone new, how long does it take before that person's quirky mannerisms become super annoying? Off the cuff, most people would answer seven years, as in "the seven-year itch," but a recent study has revealed that the spark dies about three years into a relationship.
It's no secret that a walk down the aisle most often brings about a weight gain of about six to nine pounds. But what's been a secret or a misinformed public opinion is that your weight gain is a key factor in determining marriage satisfaction. Actually, marital satisfaction is better determined by a wife's weight gain relative to her husband's. University of Tennessee psychologist Andrea Maltzer's team tracked 165 couples over a four-year timespan. The couples completed questionnaires every six months to determine their level of satisfaction. Findings? Husbands that were satisfied at the time of marriage remained so over time, to the extent that their wives maintained lower BMIs than their own, researchers reported.
Ladies, if you were recently broken up with, congratulations: you just got more attractive. New findings published by the University of Michigan say that men prefer women who were dumped by their last boyfriends, while women prefer men who initiated their last breakup. To study how past relationships affected future efforts, researchers gauged the responses of 198 heterosexual participants to fake online dating ads. Participants were asked to rate the ads based on shallow information, and then upon learning how that person's last relationship ended. Researchers also asked subjects to note whether they wanted a long-term relationship with the person, or whether they just wanted sex. For men, the woman's relationship history mattered only when he wanted a serious relationship with her. When it came to trysts, he didn't care who did the dumping as long as she were willing to move on with him.
Bad news, ladies. Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, says that handsome men are a dying breed. According to research collected over a 53-year period, beautiful people are more likely to bear daughters, so as women populate the earth, the likelihood that the pretty ones will pass on their "attractiveness" genes to sons decreases.
Do you know, off the top of your head, how your spouse likes his coffee? While a few decades of marriage sounds like plenty of time for spouses to figure out each others' favorite breakfast foods or movies, a new study finds that couples who have been married for forty years know less about each others' preferences than couples who have been in committed relationships for one or two years.
The more relationship studies we read, the more convinced we are that love confounds science, doctorate degree holders, and couples all alike. As you might remember, we recently discussed findings that couples don't grow more alike over time. Now, a new study says that happy couples mimic each other's speech patterns and writing styles. A quick disclaimer: as the previously referenced study suggests, science thinks that the "opposites attract" theory is bull. Instead of growing more alike over time, couples date people with similar interests from the onset. Effective couples communication usually entails that couples have similar communicative styles in the first place.So it's not as if someone who talks like Snooki will develop Oscar Wilde-ian eloquence after dating someone with that caliber of wit. Say all you want about non-verbal communication, but a blissful couplehood won't last long without regular exchange of words in some form.
Love Bytes: Nine must-click sex, love and relationship links.
