Contents
When sex is preceded by friendship, the appearance of a partner is no longer so important, psychologists have found.
Beauty, as you know, is a terrible force. Even scientifically. Study after study proves this: beautiful people earn more, they are more loved, they are treated more leniently… Even the court gives them a lighter sentence than their less attractive accomplices! In a word, beauty opens many doors, and even more so in the sphere of romantic relationships. According to the ideas that exist simultaneously in the mass consciousness and in the scientific theory of evolution, beautiful people make beautiful partners for themselves. But in reality this is not always the case. We all know the couples “he is handsome, she is a gray mouse” and, conversely, “she is beautiful, and he is plain”. The mystery of such unions has long intrigued both psychologists and biologists. Psychologist Lucy Hunt and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin offer their explanation: these couples arise if their sexual relationship was preceded by friendship.
Read more:
- Ugly … but absolutely irresistible!
Lucy Hunt conducted a survey of 167 couples, finding out how their love union came about. Each participant was asked several questions, and then compared to see if the partners’ answers were the same. Among the 81% of those who answered the same way, 40% said that the relationship began with friendship, 41% bypassed this stage of the relationship. The remaining 19% of couples gave different answers: one partner believed that there was a friendship, the second denied it.
To determine the degree of attractiveness of these people, a group of student volunteers (not aware of the purpose of the study) were asked to rate the appearance of the participants on a 7-point scale. Differences in estimates were insignificant. Based on this (highly confidential) data, Lucy Hunt calculated how attractive men and women in a couple match each other in terms of attractiveness.
Read more:
- Handsome men are more forgiven
And here’s what turned out. For those couples who, after dating, very quickly switched to sex, the attractiveness correlation was 0,46 (with a maximum of 1,0). Simply put, in such pairs, with a high probability, a handsome man and a partner will turn out to be beautiful. But for couples who started out as friends, the picture was completely different. There, the correlation was only 0,18. In other words, in those couples where two were first friends for quite a long time, and then became lovers, both partners were much less likely to be good-looking.
What follows from this? When friendship precedes sex, the appearance of a potential partner ceases to be decisive. But why? One explanation offered by Lucy Hunt is that friendship allows us to see and appreciate qualities deeper than external attractiveness, such as intelligence and reliability. Given the enormous contribution that both parents make to the upbringing of children, a preliminary study of each other’s characters can be very valuable for future generations.
However, there are still many unknowns here. How, for example, to explain love at first sight, why does it arise? Or if, from an evolutionary point of view, beauty and good parenting are equivalent, what then can be said about the parenting qualities of beautiful spouses?
See more at publications of The Economist.