She is stunning and impressive, yet she remains isolated! Strangely, being attractive doesn’t make the search for a soulmate easier. To explain this paradox, we must remember that even though we all claim that “appearance isn’t everything,” the reality is that couples tend to be matched based on physical attractiveness. Attractive individuals pair up with other attractive people, those of average attractiveness with their equals, and the less attractive with others in a similar situation. However, there are exceptions.
The Range of Romantic Choices
In 2008, American and Dutch psychologists studying married couples discovered that most spouses find their partners appealing, with an average rating of 8/10 and three-quarters receiving scores above 7/10. A decade earlier, psychologist Matthew Montoya, then at the University of North Carolina, had observed the same trend, noting that casual partners were generally assessed positively, with all receiving at least average ratings.
While most couples tend to form among individuals of equivalent (or perceived equivalent) physical appeal, Montoya suggests that we unconsciously set a range of beauty within which we seek our partners: not less attractive than ourselves, but not excessively so either.
The Curse of Beauty
In other words, we rarely hesitate to try to attract someone more appealing than ourselves, or rather, relative to “how we view ourselves” (some underestimate while others overestimate!). The corollary is that the more attractive we are, the less appealing we find others, thereby narrowing our possible choices. The market for physically perfect individuals is more limited than we might think. Fortunately, many other criteria influence partner selection, and physical attractiveness (even when subjective) is not the only factor for romantic compatibility.
Three years ago, Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt from the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated through a series of studies that individuals hold very personal opinions about who is attractive, intelligent, or popular within a newly formed group of students; the better the group knows each other, the greater the variation in judgment becomes. Researchers noted especially that while “some participants quickly engaged in sexual relations after meeting,” most “took their time getting to know one another before pursuing or beginning a romantic relationship.”
