If you measure enough things about enough couples, here is what you will find. Not surprisingly, the highest correlation coefficients—typically around +0.9—are for religion, ethnic background, race, socioeconomic status, age, and political views. That is, most husbands and wives prove to be of the same religion, ethnic background, and so on. Perhaps you also will not be surprised that the next highest correlation coefficients, usually around +0.4, are for measures of personality and intelligence, such as extroversion, neatness, and IQ. Slobs tend to marry slobs, though the chances of a slob marrying a compulsively neat person are not as low as the chances of a political reactionary marrying a left-winger.
What about matching of husbands and wives for physical characteristics? The answer is not one that would leap out at you immediately if you just looked at a few married couples. That is because we do not select our own mates for their bodies as carefully as we select the mates of our show dogs, racehorses, and beef cattle. But we select nevertheless. If you measure enough couples, the answer that finally emerges is unexpectedly simple. On the average, spouses resemble each other slightly but significantly in almost every physical feature examined. That is true of all the obvious traits you would first think of when asked to design your ideal beloved—his or her height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, and skin colour—but it is also true of an astonishing variety of other traits that you probably would not have mentioned in your description of the perfect sex partner. Those other traits include ones as diverse as breadth of nose, length of ear lobe or middle finger, circumference of wrist, distance between eyes, and lung volume! Experimenters have made this finding for people as diverse as Poles in Poland, Americans in Michigan, and Africans in Chad. If you do not believe it, try noting eye colours (or measuring ear lobes) the next time you are at a dinner party with many couples, and then get your pocket calculator to give you the correlation coefficient.
Coefficients for physical traits are on the average +0.2- not so high as for personality traits (+0.4) or religion (+0.9), but still significantly higher than zero. For a few physical traits the correlation is even higher than 0.2-for instance, an astonishing 0.61 for length of middle finger. At least unconsciously people care more about their spouse's middle finger length than about his or her hair colour and intelligence!
Thus, like tends to marry like. Among the obvious explanations that contribute to these results is propinquity: we tend to live in neighbourhoods defined by socioeconomic status, religion, and ethnic background. For instance, in large American cities one can point to the rich neighbourhoods and the poor neighbourhoods, and also to the Jewish section, Chinese section, Italian section, black section, and so on. We meet people of the same religion when we go to church, and we tend to meet people of similar socioeconomic status or political views in many of our daily activities. Since we thus have far more opportunities to meet people like us than unlike us in these respects, of course we are more likely to marry someone of our religion, socioeconomic status, and so on. But we don't live in neighbourhoods grouped by length of ear lobe, so there must be some other reason why spouses tend to be matched in that respect as well.
Another obvious reason why like tends to marry like is that marriage is not just a choice; it is a negotiation. We do not go out searching until we find a person with the right eye colour and length of middle finger, then announce to that person, 'You are marrying me'. For most of us, marriage results from a proposal rather than a unilateral announcement, and the proposal is the culmination of some sort of negotiation. The more similar a man and woman are in political views, religion, and personality, the smoother will be the negotiation. Hence the match in personality traits is on the average closer for married couples than for dating couples, closer for happily than unhappily married couples, and closer for couples who stay married than for those who get divorced. But this still does not explain spousal resemblance in ear lobe length, which is only rarely cited as a factor in divorce. The remaining factor deciding whom you will marry, besides propinquity and smoothness of negotiation, is surely sexual attraction based on physical appearance. That in itself is no surprise. Most of us are aware of our preferences in obvious visible features like height, build, and hair colour. What is initially surprising is the importance of so many other physical traits that we usually do not consciously notice, such as ear lobes, middle fingers, and interocular distances. Nevertheless, all those other traits contribute unconsciously to the snap decisions we make when we are introduced to someone and a voice inside tells us, 'She's my type! Here is an example. When my wife and I were introduced to each other, I instantly found Marie attractive and vice versa. In retrospect, I can understand why: we are both brown-eyed, similar in height and build and hair colour, and so on. But, on the other hand, I also had a sense that there was something about Marie that did not quite match my ideal, even though I could not figure out what exactly it was. Not until Marie and I first went to a ballet together did I solve the puzzle. I lent Marie my opera glasses, and when she passed them back to me, I found that she had pushed the eye-pieces so close together that I could not see through them until I had spread them apart again. I then realized that Marie has more close-set eyes than I do, and that most women whom I had pursued before had wide-set eyes like my own. Thanks to Marie's ear lobes and other merits, I have been able to make peace with my and her mismatched interocular distances. Nevertheless, the episode with the opera glasses made me appreciate for the first time that I have always found wide-set eyes a turn-on, even though
I had not been explicitly aware of it.
So, we tend to marry someone who looks like us. But—wait a minute. The men who look most similar to a woman are the men who share half of her genes—her father or brother!
Similarly, the best-matched mate for a man would be his mother or sister! Yet most of us obey the incest taboo and certainly do not marry our parent or sibling of the opposite sex.
Instead, I am saying that people tend to marry a person who looks like the parent or sibling of the opposite sex. Our actual behaviour is summed up by a popular song of the 1920s.
The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us. As children, we already begin to develop our search image of a future sex partner, and that image is heavily influenced by the people of the opposite sex whom we see most often.
For most of us that is our mother (or father) and sister (or brother), plus close childhood friends.
At this point, you are probably turning to your spouse or Significant Other, pulling out your tape measure, and discovering a gross mismatch between your and his (or her) ear lobes. Or perhaps you have pulled out a photo of your mother or sister, and you detect not the faintest resemblance when you hold it beside your spouse. You may be about to throw away this book as patent nonsense. But if your wife is not a dead ringer for your mother, don't stop reading, and conversely don't get worried that you should see a psychiatrist about your pathological search image. After all, remember: