Dr Paul Eastwick

Again, if you had two people in front of you, here's a useful thought experiment.

You got a guy and two women, and you're trying to guess which one is his partner.

If you pick the woman that is closer to him in attractiveness, you're gonna be right about 70% of the time, okay?

So that's about how powerful that effect is, notably higher than 50-50.

A lot of that effect can be explained by some of this competition and mating market stuff that we're talking about, right?

People initially meeting, getting to know each other when relationships form out of that milieu, out of parties, out of online dating.

That's where the matching comes from.

What we also see is that if you want to explain the mismatched couples, look at how long they knew each other before they got together.

Quite commonly, what we see in some of our work is that those were people who knew each other for a long time before they formed a relationship.

Again, that gave them time for those idiosyncrasies to form.

But here's the key thing.

I've got a set of matched couples and a set of mismatched couples.

The matched couples.

Yeah.

And an eight and a five.

Something like that.

Okay.

So, so I got, I got a seven and a seven.

I got an eight and a five.

there is no indication whatsoever that the eight and the five are going to break up sooner, be more miserable, be more likely to cheat relative to the seven and the seven.