Birds of a Feather

At the back of my mind, which is an unpleasant place to be it must be said, is a vague memory of a study carried out at a University about physical beauty.

The details of the study as well as the way it was carried out remain blurred in the depths of the brain cells. The brain, at my age, possibly fails to function as accurately as one would hope.

We are aware that memory is a strange phenomenon. We remember what we want to remember and that recollection is coloured, shaded and shaped by what we expected to remember as well as the context in which it was placed.

Accurate? No. In a previous ‘Blog’ I did mention that we all tell lies, not because we want to or even because we benefit in some way but because we cannot help it.

Our memory lies to us so we continue that lie to other people. We do it unconsciously and innocently.

So it is that my memory of this study is, at best, shaky. However (this is a posh ‘but’!), I remember, or think I do, the results.

What they came up with in the end is the same thing that my Granny would have told them that ‘like’ goes with ‘like’.

There is a recollection of boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties being scooped up from the University grounds, dressed in baggy clothes and having a head scarf put over their hair. All the clothes and scarves were grey. Then, by some (forgotten) means, they teamed up in pairs—one boy with one girl. Each of them wore a number but there were no other forms of identification to ensure anonymity.

The process was then repeated but now they wore fairly tight fitting clothes and no headscarf.

In each case the numbers were recorded.

Prior to this exercise the youngsters were assessed in terms of physical beauty; they were given a rating based on that assessment but this was unknown to the participants, of course.

The result was fairly uniform. The students who had a low assessment of their physical beauty paired up with a member of the opposite sex with a similar rating and the ‘Alpha’ male and female would tend to pair up.

So, as Granny said, ‘like’ will find ‘like’. It is unusual to find dissimilarities between male and female couples. Those that we perceive as ‘beautiful’ will almost always pair with another ‘beautiful’ person.

There are, not unnaturally, exceptions to this. I am greatly fortunate in that I have a lovely wife to look at but, sadly for her, she only has me!

What about Hugh Hefner? He can hardly be regarded as devilishly handsome and physically robust and yet his wife, who at twenty-six is sixty years his junior, can be considered quite attractive. She also, it turns out, has a degree in psychology. Perhaps she knows something that we do not.

It would appear that this deviation from the mean could be affected by other factors. Wealth would appear to be the main one—or opportunity to gain wealth, perhaps.

In my last ‘Blog’ I spoke of Dirk and his wife. He was a lowly Fitter in the Belgian Air Force while his wife was an actress; she was unutterably lovely, he was... er... not.

Where does that fit in the overall plane of things?

Look around you. Observe your friends and their families and note the similarities.

Then have a look at their pets...