Your mum looks like your dad

Maybe it is just me but I actually feel that couples who have been together for so long look alike. There is actually this particular middle aged couple who attends the same church as I do (not the same branch though). People do call this couple twins, because they actually look alike. I have always been curious about this as I have seen several others aged couples like this. So imagine how interested I was when the topic “Do couples who live together for many years look alike? Either support or oppose the topic” was given to my little brother (who is by the way taller than me) as one of his term paper assignments. I immediately offered to help him. As at the time of writing this article his grade came out and he got 9/10. Ha-ha I am a proud big brother.

Researchers have actually started looking at the possibilities of couples looking alike after staying together for a while as early as in the late nineteenth century and underwent researches to prove this phenomenon that couples faces tend to look alike after staying together for a while whereas their faces were not similar before marriage. One of such research was conducted by a group of researchers from Stanford University and an experiment was done so as to make this hypothesis a theory. It was concluded that there was actually no evidence to prove that couples look more alike as time passed but let it be stated that sometimes the existence of certain things cannot be proven by scientist even if the existence of these things are glaring to us. For example Fingerprints. Every human has a unique fingerprints and they are not identical with each other, even twins which have identical face, don’t share the same fingerprint. Scientist haven’t been able to prove why this is true also as this has always been a mystery to them.

So we did a little more digging and found another study performed by a psychologist from the University of Michigan who conducted an experiment to test this phenomenon. He carried out analysis on the photographs of couple’s taken when they were newlyweds and photographs of the same couple taken 25 years later. The results showed that couples had grown to look more like each other over time, and the happier the couple said they were, the more likely they were to have in their physical similarity. I personally think this is true, citing the couples I mentioned in the first paragraph as an example.

There are speculations that old couples look more alike because people in close contact mimic each other’s facial expression as time passes they tend to develop the same laugh lines around their chins. Other factors that might influence why couples look alive after staying together for a while includes the food they eat, weather they’ve shared , the same environment. They perform the same activities and mimic each other facial expression.
Then again, there is a particular school of thought that links the resemblance of these couples to when their marriage took place. A study by different researchers showed that women are more comfortable to choosing men who look like their fathers as life partners. The study also shows that women who had strong father-daughter relationship whilst growing up have a higher chance using their fathers as models for their life partners, personally, I don’t agree with this school of thought.

Well, let me know your thoughts on this in the comment section.