3. Attractiveness and Partner Choice | Consonance (Gleichklang)

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Attractiveness and Partner Choice | Consonance (Gleichklang)

The Role of Attractiveness

In a study by De Vries et al. (2008) with participants from a large dating platform, interest in getting to know a participant could be statistically predicted solely by the attractiveness of the photo. In contrast, the free text played no role at all.

A qualitative study by Jänkälä et al. (2019) on the role of photos in partner search among Tinder users also shows how important photos are for partner search:

• Photos were carefully selected because they were decisive in whether other participants agreed to further contact or blocked it.

However, it is not unconditionally true that physically attractive people are preferred. Another influencing factor is the perceived own attractiveness:

• The less attractive people perceive themselves to be, the more they seem to shy away from choosing attractive dating partners.

It is suspected that this is particularly related to the fear of being rejected. The results of two experiments by Greitmeyer (2010) are consistent with this hypothesis:

• These experiments showed that feedback indicating that someone was interested in oneself also increased the interest in contacting even attractive people. In contrast, feedback indicating that another person was not interested in oneself led to one being more interested in less attractive people.

Accordingly, attractive people are preferentially sought, provided there is no fear of rejection. Unattractive people, on the other hand, are rejected more often, especially when they are rated as less attractive than oneself.

As a result, the level of attractiveness of partners typically converges.

The phenomenon of so‑called love at first sight also illustrates how important appearance can be for the experience of attraction:

• Zsok et al. (2017) surveyed people online in a laboratory setting and at various dating events to ask whether they had experienced love at first sight when viewing photos or meeting other people. It was found that the occurrence of love at first sight was predictable solely by the perceived physical attractiveness of the respective person.

The high significance of appearance in partner search is further underscored by the observation that, in online dating, profiles without photos usually receive little or no response.

Profiles often even contain a direct statement that contact with participants without a photo is not desired or that at least they should immediately send a photo when making contact.

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to think that it ultimately comes down only to appearance in partner search:

For example, physically attractive people are attributed many further positive qualities that often have nothing to do with physicality – psychology refers to this as the so‑called halo effect (Standing, 2004). This means that interest does not necessarily have to relate only to appearance. Rather, many people unconsciously assume that physically attractive people also have other positive traits in their personality and character.

Of course, this conclusion is often incorrect and can therefore lead to flawed relationship decisions.

However, the conclusion does not always have to be wrong:

• For example, Brand et al. (2012) observed that people whose photos were rated as attractive more often wrote texts that, completely independent of the photo, were also rated as attractive. Possibly, people who are generally perceived as attractive behave more confidently, which in turn is generally an attractive trait.

However, findings by Ma‑Kellams et al. (2017) may serve as a warning against focusing on physical attractiveness: people who were rated as particularly attractive based on their photos in high school yearbooks were later characterized by more frequent divorces and shorter marriages.

So we should be careful not to infer too much positive from physical attractiveness.

After all, even what we experience as attractive can change. Our early automatic evaluation processes do not always withstand a later reassessment. With closer acquaintance, many more impressions arise and we gain more information about a person, which may lead to a change in the assessment of appearance, overall attractiveness, and perceived attraction to another person.

Studies (Swami et al., 2009) also show that the perception of attractiveness in couples is subjectively biased in favor of partners. At comparable attractiveness, partners are rated as more attractive than oneself. The strength of this effect, in turn, correlates positively with relationship satisfaction.

Penton‑Voak et al. (2007) went a step further and manipulated the facial images of partners, making them more attractive or unattractive. Participants were then asked to select the correct image corresponding to reality. The interesting result was that people who were satisfied with their relationship chose the attractive image, while those dissatisfied with the relationship chose the unattractive image.

So it does not depend only on external characteristics whether we find a person attractive or not. Human perception of attractiveness is flexible, and with corresponding sympathy, the appearance of partners can also be viewed benevolently.

This is a clear warning against falling into a behavioral pattern in online dating where you mainly look at images and make selection decisions based solely on visual stimuli. This leads to an information reduction that is hardly suitable for making appropriate decisions.

If, in your partner search, you exclude potentially suitable people based on lightning‑fast photo evaluations, you run the risk of excluding someone whom you would have experienced as attractive overall when getting to know them.

Moreover, the assumption that attractiveness is determined solely by appearance is too pessimistic:

• For example, a further study by De Vries (2010) following the original investigation showed that the free text in online dating did have an independent influence on interest in getting to know a person when it was ensured that the text was read completely, that the texts of different people differed sufficiently, and that there was no information overload due to too many profiles and long texts.

Even in the area of sexuality – where appearance plays a particularly large role – it would be an oversimplification to focus exclusively on appearance. Because sexual desire in partnerships also depends on a variety of factors:

• In interviews with 20 women, Murray and Milhausen (2012), for example, showed that besides the physical attractiveness of partners, the sexual wishes of partners, their attention, emotional closeness, time spent together, or communication with each other were also significant. In addition, other personal influencing factors such as emotional state, physical energy level, or attitude toward sexuality played a role. External factors such as current life situation, health status, conversations about sexuality with reference persons, or embeddedness in religious belief systems could also be identified as influencing factors.

Even if it were only about sexual desire, partner selection based purely on physical attractiveness would not be a guarantee for a satisfying sex life. And of course, this applies even more to a partnership, which involves far more dimensions of encounter.

Care and protection, understanding, shared activities, empathy, emotional closeness and intimacy, taking responsibility, and many other features of relationships simply cannot be derived from physical attractiveness or developed and maintained solely with the help of physical attractiveness.

Another point: are people in relationships happier when their partners have high physical attractiveness?

It is undisputed that partner selection decisions are also made on the basis of physical attractiveness:

• McNulty et al. (2008) discuss a variety of studies showing that in the phase of relationship formation and at the very beginning of a relationship, the physical attractiveness of partners does indeed affect relationship satisfaction.

However, the authors argue that many couples in these early phases still know little about each other, therefore focus their satisfaction experience on directly visible physical attractiveness, and, lacking sufficient information, may be more inclined to infer other factors of personality and behavior from appearance.

But how does this situation present itself when couples already know each other well and have just gotten married?

• McNulty et al. (2008) investigated this question in a study with 82 couples and, among many other interesting findings, came to the result that the physical attractiveness of partners had no influence on relationship satisfaction in men and women who had married within the last six months. Whether partners were more or less attractive thus led to no higher or lower relationship satisfaction. Moreover, the authors also observed no influence of attractiveness differences between partners on the satisfaction of the newlywed women and men surveyed.

The state of research is complex, and there are also other observations (Meltzer et al., 2014) in which men, in contrast to women, showed higher relationship satisfaction when they had attractive partners. But here too, the influence of external attractiveness on relationship satisfaction was only moderate overall.

Ultimately, physical attractiveness plays only a limited role in relationship satisfaction, although the initially stronger correlations for initial partner selection may well be related to information deficits and illusory expectations.

Overall, photos on dating platforms therefore certainly say little to nothing about whether a happy and stable relationship can develop between two people.

Apart from the danger that photos may also be false or altered, too strong a focus on photos and external attractiveness can also lead to more important factors for a relationship – such as values, character, or life goals – being overlooked, resulting in unfavorable partner selection decisions.

Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder

Incidentally, is there actually a general physical attractiveness?

There is psychological evidence for this (Langlois et al., 2000), according to which different raters often rated physical attractiveness very consistently, and this high agreement even remained when the raters came from different cultures and rated people from different cultures.

However, other authors (Zhan et al., 2021) found large differences in face preferences between raters from Western Europe and East Asia, and these were also highly individual, not only culturally influenced.

Glasser et al. (2009) also observed that white men in the USA more often preferred slim‑athletic women, while African Americans and Latinos more often preferred fuller‑figured women.

The cultural dependence of the preference for light or dark skin tones is also well known:

• In countries with predominantly light skin tones, millions of people strive for darker skin through tanning products and sunbathing, while in large parts of Asia, for example, lighter skin is considered the ideal of beauty, generating high revenues for an entire bleaching industry. And such cultural differences have not simply always existed; they are also subject to developmental processes. For example, in Western Europe, a light skin type used to be considered distinguished because it indicated that those concerned did not have to do physical labor.

Perceived attractiveness is thus a highly subjective attribution. Even if we often agree on whether we rate someone as generally attractive or less attractive, our individual taste may differ from this general experience of attractiveness.

A quick look at various online forums is enough to be convinced that for absolutely every possible physical peculiarity, there are people who experience exactly that peculiarity as attractive.

To give just one example: while the normative standard in Western Europe may rate slim‑athletic women and athletic men as attractive, there are also countless other people in Western Europe who like fat women or fat men.

Beauty is thus ultimately in the eye of the beholder, and objective criteria for such subjective‑aesthetic judgments cannot be given.

Learning processes not only take place over generations in cultural contexts, but conversely, our perception of attractiveness is also influenced by the immediate context. Moreover, preferences can change during an individual’s lifetime:

• For example, Zhao and Zang (2019) showed in an experiment that a face to be judged was rated as more attractive when other faces were rather less attractive, and conversely as less attractive when other faces were more attractive. Our attractiveness ratings are therefore not absolute but are influenced by the context, the relationship.

Changes in preferences over a lifetime can be observed, for example, in couples of advanced age who still find each other attractive, but who in their younger years would with high probability not have found partners of their current age attractive.

A study from Nicaragua (Boothroyd et al., 2020) shows how individual preference changes can also be steered via media that convey certain beauty ideals:

• Over three years, with increasing television consumption, men’s preference for slim women increased. The presentation of images showing slim female models could also lead to such a preference.

Example: Body Height

Women seek tall men who are taller than or at least as tall as themselves. Men seek women who are shorter or at most as tall as themselves.

As a result, short men and tall women have a particularly hard time in partner search and must expect a lot of rejection.

This is not just a cliché. The preferences described remain alive despite all efforts toward gender equality:

• Stulp et al. (2013) found that heterosexual women’s ideal partner is 21 cm taller than themselves. According to this study, men are somewhat less strict and prefer a partner who is 8 cm shorter than themselves.

• Psychologists Yancey and Emerson (2014) also come to the conclusion that a partner’s height is more important to women than to men. However, when asked about the reasons for women’s strong preference for taller men, these apparently lie less in experiences and deeply rooted psychological motives, but seem to be largely due to social gender role images and social pressure.

Are women actually happier with taller partners than with equally tall or shorter partners?

In a large study from Indonesia, Sohn (2016) examined the influence of different body heights between men and women on women’s relationship satisfaction. In this study, women with taller men did indeed report slightly higher relationship satisfaction, but this effect decreased with years of relationship duration and disappeared completely after 18 years.

However, it is possible that this effect again results only from social pressure, which extends through the reactions of the social environment into relationship satisfaction – which would be consistent with the findings of Yancey and Emerson (2014) presented above. It can be assumed that those concerned learned over the years to better distance themselves from this social pressure, so that the effect of height difference on relationship satisfaction decreased and finally disappeared completely.

Arguments in favor of partner selection based on body height are objectively not very convincing and seem contrived. There are neither difficulties with sexuality, tenderness, and kissing, nor is the experience of security or safety tied to body height.

Certainly, visible deviations from the social norm may lead to some glances or comments from the social environment. But you can grow from this and improve your self‑confidence if the foundation of a sustainable love is present.

Journalist Lilly Bittner reports in an article in the FAZ about her relationship with her partner, who is half a head shorter than her. Her account shows how her own evaluation changed from “I am terrified that the guy is short” before she met her partner, to a calm and positive handling of this still not entirely typical height difference.

You will have this same experience if you engage in a romantic encounter with an empathetic person who fits you, whose body height lies outside your gender‑typical search pattern.

If there is no deeper fit, even a gender‑typical body height will not be able to make your relationship happy. But if there is a fit in values, relationship models, and life goals, body height will not override this fit.

Incidentally, heterosexual people seeking partners can learn a lot from same‑sex couples, where by definition there can be no gender‑typical search for body height.

What do all these findings mean for online dating?

Physical attractiveness is certainly a desirable feature in partner search. However, this depends in various ways on subjective evaluation processes that are shaped by context and individual learning experiences.

Once again: attractive partners are no guarantee that happy and stable relationships will develop. Fixating on physical attractiveness in partner search increases the danger of making wrong decisions.

Therefore, in online dating, distance yourself from purely visually driven selection processes. Strive to gain a holistic impression of a person’s possible fit for a shared life. Often this is only possible by initiating direct communication, which is why prematurely “sorting out” profiles is not advisable.

Once you get to know each other, the mutual exploration of fit and a change of perspective may lead to a change in the assessment of attractiveness as well. People may suddenly appear attractive who previously seemed unattractive, or vice versa.

Questioning What Seems Self‑Evident

There are many things that we take for granted. But if we thought about them, we might arrive at completely different conclusions. Sometimes we even have fixed implicit or explicit core assumptions that we presuppose and apply even when, upon closer examination, we would actually prefer to change them. In partner search, this can mean missing opportunities.

Examples of core assumptions and their questioning:

• “I will always stay in my homeland.” Why not emigrate to the right country with the right person?

• “A vegan person is out of the question.” Why not, actually? Couldn’t a vegan lifestyle perhaps improve your health or bring you into greater consistency with your values?

• “A university degree is required.” Really? Aren’t there also many people with a wealth of knowledge and heart who don’t even have a school diploma?

• “There must be great romance and butterflies in the stomach.” Why not be happy in deep friendship love?

• “The man must definitely be taller than me.” Does height say anything about character, qualities, or shared possibilities for shaping life?

• “In online dating, potentially suitable people must live near me.” Do you want to miss the person of your dreams because they live farther away?

Identifying and Questioning Your Own Core Assumptions

Identify your core assumptions and question them. This helps you to separate what is important from what is unimportant, to remain true to yourself, but at the same time to remove unnecessary limitations.

Write down your core assumptions and the resulting questions in keywords. Then give yourself the answer as to whether the core assumptions contain indispensable matters or premature commitments.

Your Balance: Review and Correct Yourself!

In the preceding chapters, you have engaged with love, its various design possibilities, and the influences of appearance. You have also dealt with what is truly important to you in partner search and where you could be more open.

Initially, you had made notes on the three questions:

• What is important to me in life?

• What should the person I am in a relationship with be like?

• What should my relationship look like?

Now please return to these notes once more:

• Check whether everything should remain as you initially wrote it.

To do this, take a red pen and go through your keywords for the three questions once more. Ask yourself for each point whether it should remain valid or whether you can do without it. Cross out the points for which you can also imagine a different way.

Remove unnecessary baggage with each crossing out.

Also make new keywords for alternative scenarios. Add important topics and aspects that you now notice were missing from your original list.

Draw your own conclusion

Summarize in a short, free, and concise text what is important to you in life, how you imagine the person you want to be with, and how such a relationship could unfold.

For this free self‑description, only consider the points you have not crossed out, and also draw on the alternatives and additions.

Of course, you can also vary how you carry out the exercise. For example, you can use a computer instead of paper and pen.

However you do it, the result should be a free text in three parts, where it is not about the beauty of the phrasing, but only about the content. What you develop in this way will help you to approach your partner search effectively and bring it to the desired success.

Is the text written? Congratulations, you have already accomplished an important step!

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