A Study Found Most People Choose Partners Based On This One Subtle Detail
A scientific reason for why all your exes looked the same.
Syda Productions | Unsplash What if the secret to romantic attraction isn't found in the obvious places we've been told to look? Forget everything you think you know about dating profiles, pickup lines, and the supposedly foolproof guides for finding love. Science has uncovered something far more fascinating and surprisingly hopeful.
A German study found that most people choose partners based on how much a person resembles them.
A 2016 study conducted by German scientists shed some light on how people pick a significant other, and it turns out, most are likely to be attracted to those who look just like them. According to the study, "Being able to comprehend another person's intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction."
This is so true because when you're dating someone, you have intense desires to understand your partner's intentions and where they are, emotionally. If you don't know these things, it can cause extreme amounts of anxiety in the relationship, all because of the uncertainty.
For this study, the scientists asked a group of people to watch videos of women and evaluate their facial expressions. The group was then asked if they wanted to meet any of the women and, if so, how badly?
The findings showed that, as the group was better able to identify how the women were feeling, the more they felt they could understand the other person.
OlgaLucky / Shutterstock
“We found the better a participant thought they could understand another person’s emotion, the more they felt attracted toward that person,” the study explained.
There is also an evolutionary side to attraction. For everyone — humans, animals — we all have the same goal: to reproduce and grow the population.
Therefore, "interpersonal attraction has been guided by the view that an individual's primary goal when evaluating other individuals must be to identify potential mating partners who possess high genetic fitness and fertility."
This study found that when you find the right person, the reward system is triggered in your brain, which makes you feel good. Neural activity is increased, which causes emotional attachment, because we like the good feeling it causes.
You may now be realizing that you and your ex-partner did, in fact, look quite similar. Not surprisingly, many celebrity couples bear striking similarities, too.
Also, the study concluded that "the neural mechanisms underlying individual adjustments of interpersonal attraction during social encounters might act through internal reward signals that are partly independent of external feedback, which makes them perhaps less prone to cheating by potential cooperation partners."
Therefore, we are attracted to similar people based on facial features because it announces someone's biological fitness.
What makes this discovery so remarkable isn't just the science behind it, but what it reveals about the intelligence of human attraction. While we've been overthinking dating apps and pickup strategies, our brains have been conducting biological assessments that we're only just beginning to understand.
The next time you catch yourself drawn to someone and can't quite explain why, remember that you might be witnessing one of nature's most elegant systems at work. You are watching two people, unconsciously recognizing in each other the promise of something greater.
Nichole Fratangelo is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on MSN, HuffPost, Insider, PopSugar, Reader's Digest, MindBodyGreen, Greatist, and more.
