Beautiful couples

Beautiful people, according to the marvellously unintelligible vocals of Australian Crawl’s James Reyne, “have Robert Palmer t-shirts in their travel bag” (or was that “juggle armadillos as they eat a rag?”). Certainly, as the song says, “beautiful people” seem to have a charmed life and they do often “couple up”. There are plenty of attractive couples around but equally there are many instances where the question is asked, “How did he get her?” or vice-versa. Why is it that some couples are matched for attractiveness where others are not? That was the question posed and, possibly, answered in new research.

The study involved data collected from couples who were involved in a long-term study of romantic relationships. The couples time together ranged from three months to 53 years and the average relationship length was eight years and eight months.

The couples were videotaped talking about their relationship and independent people were brought in to rate the attractiveness of the individuals involved. As usually happens, the ratings for attractiveness were highly constant across the individual raters so the researchers were able to definitively rate the individuals in the couples as either attractive or unattractive.

The researchers then looked at the data on the relationships to whether there was any correlation between the attractiveness of the people in the relationship and how long it took them to get together after meeting. The data showed that the longer the couples had known each other before dating the less likely they were to be matched for attractiveness. In other words, couples who become involved soon after meeting tend to be similar in terms of attractiveness. Partners who began dating within a month of meeting showed a strong correlation for physical attractiveness but the correlation was much lower the longer the partners had known each other.

The researchers think that this is because while Beauty or attractiveness is a good short term marker of a desirable partner in the long term as people get to know each other across a variety of contexts objective physical attractiveness becomes less relevant.

Interestingly, there was no link between matched attractiveness and success of the relationship. Couples who were friends before getting together romantically were no more or less likely to be happy than those who were strangers. Which just goes to show that you can judge a book by its cover if you want to but ultimately it is the text inside that matters.