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For most people, positive assortative mating takes place unconsciously (unless you actively seek someone from the same ethnic background or religion). Here’s how it plays out in real life:
The people in your neighborhood
The simplest reason why you may marry someone like yourself hinges on convenience and geography. “It’s more likely to meet someone from your own social circles because they go to the same church or school or university or live in the same area,” says Abdel Abdellaoui, a genetics researcher at VU University Amsterdam.
Abdellaoui found that in the Netherlands, people who live in the northern part of the country are genetically distinguishable from people in the southern part of the country because people tend to marry their neighbors. “Many of the genetic similarities can be explained by people with similar ancestries having children,” Abdellaoui says. “Our studies look at whether people assortatively mate or not, and they do, clearly. The majority of the spouse pairs resemble each other more than you would expect by chance.”
Of course, you may not always live in the neighborhood where you’re raised. If you attend university, you move onto a campus where you’re surrounded by your intellectual and socioeconomic equals. Once you start working, you may relocate to a city where it’s easier to find a job in your field, then spend the majority of your waking hours interacting with business associates with the same education level and similar socioeconomic standing.
If you’re an attorney, you’re much more likely to fall in love with an attorney or another professional you meet through colleagues or friends. You’ve still found a partner through positive assortative mating, but your similarities are less physically obvious. “Higher-educated spouses have children that have a little more genetic variation that those with lower education because they migrate less,” Abdellaoui says.
What’s cookin,’ good lookin’?
If you’ve ever done a double-take because you’ve seen a beautiful woman walking hand-in-hand with a really unattractive man, you won’t be surprised to learn that research confirms that this doesn’t happen often: Most people assortatively mate for levels of attractiveness.
“The most attractive people will pair up with the most attractive, and the medium attractiveness people will pair up and the lowest attractiveness people match up,” Tashiro says. “You can get mismatches, of course, usually due to socioeconomic differences. In general, you get attractive people with attractive people.” This doesn’t mean that unattractive people don’t find attractive people appealing. Rather, Tashiro explains, “people are self-aware of their standing in the world of attractiveness and realize that their best chance of reciprocated attraction is with those at roughly the same level.”
