April Wellness: Looking Like Love

My longtime friends are all getting married and starting to have babies.

And I've noticed something peculiar.

Most of them are opting to settle down with someone who resembles them in looks. Sometimes it's not an exact imitation, but often a partner will have a similar face shape, or nose type, or even charming crooked smile. Even more odd, I've observed that last names are often the same type of last name: A hearty Jones type of last name (a solid, common name) will more often than not marry a Johnson, just as an example. Exotic to exotic, ordinary to ordinary, literal to literal. Think about your paired friends for a moment.

Don't believe me? Okay, here's a fun little celeb photo gallery to show that, yes, we are picking our doppelgangers. Scroll down below to answer the mystery: Why?

Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gylenhaal share similar eyes, chins and brunette coloring...and their last names both have double AAs.

Sting and Trudie Styler have a serious brother/sister thing going on, with long noses, rosy skin complexions, and matching smirks.

Bennifer has always looked like brother and sister to me. And didn't he date ANOTHER famous Jennifer before her as well? Both have Roman noses, and matching angled jaw lines.

Besides the same clothing color combination with matching sunglasses, Keith and Nicole share the same smile, blond locks, matching cheekbones and seem to have matching plastic surgery. She looks a lot more like Keith than she did her last husband, Tom Cruise... maybe it will last longer.

Pete Wentz and (ex?) wife Ashlee Simpson share the same hairstyle... even their bangs flow the same direction... face shape, triangular chins, and eyebrows.

Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady, matching Barbie and Ken, share similar eye and cheekbone structure, and olive tan coloring.

Denzel Washington and his wife of years share similar cheeks and teeth, with joyous beams that match.

Perhaps the real reason Sienna Miller and Jude Law keep getting drawn to each other is because of their matching genetics!

Finally, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise look so similar that it's almost as if his agent picked her out of a magazine for him... ahem.

What exactly is going on here? Are we picking people that remind us of ourselves from the start? Or are we becoming more like our partner over time? And how much does the law of attraction factor in?

Part of the common human experience is that everyone desires love. Although opposites can attract, we are often more attracted to a person who understands us, which will often come from a similarity of spirit.

A University of Michigan study in the late 80s discovered that couples who originally bore little resemblance to each other when first married actually grew into resembling each other. Young couples showed dramatically less similarity than did couples married for 25 years or more. Further, the more marital happiness a couple claimed, the greater their faces resembled each other! The creator of the study attributed his findings to several ideas. People often unconsciously mimic the facial expressions of their spouses. This "silent empathy" can actually cause the shape of the face to change. Like other body muscles, facial muscles can atrophy or grow depending on the amount of use, and over decades, can alter wrinkle patterns and even bone size. Diet can also be a factor, since the longer a couple are together, they often receive (or lack) the same nutrients, which can relate to facial fat.

Another study approached this from the opposite side up the same mountain: Researchers with the University of Liverpool believe facial characteristics can be an indicator of personality traits, not the other way around. Study participants were asked to look at photographs of people without knowing whom their partner was. If the female face was determined "sociable" by participants, then her partner was also more likely to be rated as "sociable".

And the University of Western Ontario found that the spouses of identical twins were also more alike than the spouses of non-identical twins.

A newly launched dating site, FindYourFaceMate.com, is tapping into this unconscious similarity seeking by using facial recognition technology to find matches.

Yet this doesn't quite explain why newer couples can also resemble each other in whirlwind weddings. Perhaps this is when our subconscious and the law of attraction kick in together, picking out someone who looks more like us because we are simply ready to be married already! Given the statistics, this seems like a good way to bank on a better long term investment. We might be hardwired to fall in love with people sporting similar DNA to us, but what we want has a large role to play.

As the daughter of racially different parents whom NO ONE has ever found similar in appearance, I pose this question to you: Do you think my parents look alike on a deeper level than just skin color?