#3 – For Couples, Time Can Upend the Laws of Attraction

Andrew Rae

The best advice I can offer young people going off to college is: Don’t hook-up with anyone in the first few weeks. Why? Because the people you’re first hanging out with will probably not be the group you settle into later and lots of people regret those early miss-steps! Well, it turns out there’s actually science behind this advice. We change our minds about attractiveness the more we know people. You probably know a guy who you thought was cute when you first met, but then he made you laugh and all of sudden he was much cuter. That’s actually a real thing. The laws of attraction change based on how the relationship evolves. Here’s the NYT piece:

At the start of the semester, the students pretty much agreed on who in their class was most desirable. But when they were asked again three months later, after spending a semester in a small class together, their judgments varied widely on who was hot and who was not.

“Perceptions of mate value change the more time that people spend together,” said Lucy Hunt, a graduate student who published the study last year with Paul Eastwick, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences.

In the survey, 33 percent of men and 43 percent of women answered yes when asked if they had ever fallen in love with someone they did not initially find attractive. Dr. Fisher terms this process “slow love,” and says it is becoming more common as people take longer to marry.

“Everyone is terrified that online dating is reducing mate value to just a few superficial things like beauty — whether you swipe left or right on Tinder,” she said in an interview. “But that’s just the start of the process. Once you meet someone and get to know them, their mate value keeps changing.”

If they’d begun going out within a month of meeting, then they tended to be equally attractive physically. But if they’d been acquaintances for a long time, or if they’d been friends before becoming lovers, then someone hot was more liable to end up with someone not so hot.

“Everyone is terrified that online dating is reducing mate value to just a few superficial things like beauty — whether you swipe left or right on Tinder,” she said in an interview. “But that’s just the start of the process. Once you meet someone and get to know them, their mate value keeps changing.”

That pattern also occurs in married couples: Attractive, well-educated, high-earning people tend to marry people like themselves. In fact, economists say that this growing trend of “assortative mating” is a major cause of income inequality, because a household with two high earners makes so much more money than a household with two low earners (or only one earner).

0 0

 

Save To Pocket

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share On Twitter