As the days get shorter and colder, we have officially entered “cuffing season”, where it may seem that everyone (except you, apparently) is getting into a relationship. There are various theories that suggest why this phenomenon occurs, but have you ever wondered what forces actually drive us to choose our partners?
The idea that we choose our partners based on our parents has been going on for a long time (thank you, Freud). For instance, a study conducted in the late 1920s by Hamilton and MacGowan, asked men if their wives resembled their mothers. A small quarter said yes, while the majority said no. Interestingly, they were then asked whether they were happy in their marriage, and all the unhappy men were with women who did not look like their mother! Granted, you should take these findings with a grain of salt since this study is quite old and not well-controlled.
What about women then? In another study, participants were shown pictures of individuals that were digitally altered to look “youthful” or “aged” and were asked to rate their attractiveness. As you would expect, pictures with somebody reflected in an older age had reduced levels of attraction. However, women who had an older father (over 30) when they were born gave stronger attraction ratings to older men, suggesting that our parents may influence later mate preferences.
On the other hand, Edvard Westermarck showed the opposite pattern when it comes to childhood familiarity. He studied communities where many unrelated children were raised closely together and found that those who grew up in close proximity rarely intermarried, a phenomenon now coined as the Westermarck effect. This suggests that familiarity during childhood actually reduces sexual attraction, potentially as an evolutionary mechanism to promote genetic diversity and prevent mating with someone too closely related.
Interestingly, avoiding people we grew up with doesn’t necessarily mean we avoid people who look like our family. A recent study found that heterosexual women tended to choose partners who resembled their brothers. In this study, women sent in photos of their boyfriends and their brothers and volunteers, who weren’t told who was who, were able to correctly match the boyfriend to the brother slightly more often than chance. The statistics were not huge by any means, but enough to give “sweet home Alabama” a scientific underpinning.
However, you might now be thinking, what about that famous “sweaty T-shirt study”? In this experiment, several male volunteers wear the same t-shirt for two days straight. The shirts were then put into identical boxes, and various women were asked to smell the shirts and rate the ones they were most sexually attracted to. The results showed that women preferred the scent of a man who had a different MHC class to them. In other words, they preferred those who were immunologically different. Interestingly, this difference was lost in women on oral contraceptives, showing that hormonal factors can influence mate choice.
Putting these ideas together, it seems that we tend to avoid mating with someone too genetically similar, like a sibling or someone you grew up with, but we are drawn to faces that are familiar to us, perhaps because it’s comfortable.
So, does this mean we are hardwired by our biology? Not necessarily, as humans are social creatures and we tend to copy and learn from others. In this study, participants were separated into groups and shown images of people’s faces and asked to rate the attractiveness of that person. Afterwards, they were shown the faces again, only this time they were able to see the scores given by other participants. They found that participants were influenced by others and conformed to the ratings of the group. This mate-choice copying may exist to save us time and energy by relying on others’ judgments when trying to find a match.
At the end of the day, who we love seems to be guided by both our genes and by our environment, so don’t blame yourself for that list of questionable exes or for that totally harmless, definitely hypothetical crush you have on this really old “hot” actor that none of your friends understand.
