Growing Old Together?

In 1967, the late Psychologist, Robert Zajonic claimed that people 'grew' to facially resemble eachother over the course of a marriage. This study was only based on photographic studies of 12 couples but he suggested that the convergence was stronger in long and happy relationships. They lived in the same way, ate the same things and laughed at the same jokes. Zajonic's hypothesis (which made its way into text-books) was recently re-evaluated by a Stanford University PhD student with the interesting name of Pin Pin Tea-makorn (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/12/researchers-crack-question-of-whether-couples-start-looking-alike). She looked at much larger numbers of couples (including 'celebrities' from the media) and had the photographs (of the couple, at various points in the marriage and random other folk) evaluated for 'similarity' by both volunteers and facial recognition technology. The study did not confirm that people grew to look more like eachother with time but did show that they appeared to be initially attracted to folk with similar features to themselves. This is an interesting finding but I suspect that there might be other issues involved in some cases. For example, athletes might get together because they are impressed by a potential partner's physique and its impact on any children. One must also (he said cynically) never rule out the size of the other individual's bank balance and/or property!