Your New Hot Partner May Already Have Chosen the Door.
If you’ve just started dating someone who you think is outside your league, here are some news that could burst your bubble. New research shows that the most dreamy and attractive people are not very good at maintaining relationships.
The study, led by Christine Ma-Kellams and published in the journal Personal Relationships , consisted of four small studies designed to answer the age-old question: Are beautiful people better or worse in long-term relationships? The first two studies in this series showed that there is a strong relationship between how attractive you are and the duration of your relationship. Overall, Ma-Kellams and her colleagues found that attractive people tended to have short-lived romances and were more likely to get divorced.
A third study based on this link suggests that likeable people in relationships are always looking for other likeable people as if they were already planning their next move. The study found that attractive people in regular relationships were more likely to show interest in other attractive people than equally attractive people who were single. Previous research has shown that people in serious relationships lose their “wandering eye” over time, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for the good-looking people among us.
Finally, a fourth study found that participants who were made to feel more attractive rated beautiful people as more attractive than those who were made to feel ugly. And the effect was even stronger for those who admitted they were unhappy with their current relationship.
Ma-Kellams and her team believe that beautiful people may be more prone to breakups and divorces because they are less willing to do all the work needed to maintain a healthy relationship . The attraction seems to give you more options in the dating pool, where the grass appears greener, so you’re less likely to water what you have.