You Are Possibly Too Attractive To Be In A Relationship
If you’re wondering why your relationships can’t last, thinking it may be your fear of commitment, your awful character, or your inability to keep your significant other interested for longer than a month, perhaps it is time to reconsider. New research actually suggests it may be down to you being too attractive.
How Being Too Attractive Affects The Length Of Your Relationships
According to a series of studies, titled ‘Attractiveness and relationship longevity: Beauty is not what it is cracked up to be’, which were carried out by Harvard University researchers, people who are too attractive are more likely to be divorced and less likely to be in long-term relationships.
Previously conducted studies had found something called “protective bias”, the tendency to not notice attractive people around us when we are in a relationship, which works as a mechanism to sustain our existing relationships. The Harvard University study looked deeper into this tendency by asking 130 people, just under half of whom were in an exclusive romantic relationship, to rate a photograph of a person of the opposite sex in terms of attractiveness. They, themselves, were also being assessed by the researchers in terms of their looks at the same time.
What this study found was that the most beautiful among them were also those more likely to find the people in the photos attractive, but – here’s an interesting twist – only if they were themselves in a relationship. It seems, therefore, that protective bias does not work the same way for attractive people and those who are average-looking; quite the opposite may be true for them.
So, whether it is you who usually decides to end things because you find yourself losing interest in your partners or have somewhat of a wandering eye, or a very beautiful partner you had that’s actually left you for another, perhaps now is a good time to stop blaming yourself and attribute the breakdown of your relationships to genes and natural charm aka simply being too attractive.