It’s absolutely no piece of breaking news that being attractive provides you with quite a number of advantages in life. Many studies have shown that attractiveness is, as we’ve always suspected, associated with a better quality of life, and it definitely makes encounters like interviews and court hearings easier to breeze through than for the rest of us uglier folks.
What isn’t as widely known, however, is how conventional attractiveness can be a detriment in many other areas of life, where being a bit less attractive would give one an edge over good-looking peers.
Attractive Couples Are More Likely To Get Divorced
Many studies have found that more attractive people have higher divorce rates than the rest, even if you’d expect it to be the complete opposite. In one study, researchers looked at the yearbook photos of men from two high schools in the US and rated them on attractiveness. They then matched them against their marriage and divorce records through ancestry.com and found that the most attractive ones of them had a much higher rate of divorce than the others. The researchers also tried this on celebrities and found the results to be the same.
Attractive Women Are Less Likely To Be Hired
We always assume that attractiveness has a part to play in the hiring process and that more conventionally attractive people must have an edge over other applicants, for obvious reasons. After all, that is one of the many benefits attractiveness is supposed to provide you with, like having hotter sexual partners and being able to skip the queue at nightclubs. While that may be the case for men, it’s not for women, at least where job hunting is concerned.
In a study done in Israel, researchers sent 2,656 pairs of resumes to job openings across the country, each including a copy with a picture of the applicant and one without. They found that the more attractive males were more likely to get a callback than the less attractive ones, but for women, it was the complete opposite. Less attractive women were more likely to be called than prettier ones, and the reason may just be good old evolutionary competitiveness. They found that the difference was particularly stark when the hiring professionals were largely female—which is usually the case in most corporate human resource departments. The researchers concluded that the HR women instinctively eliminated female applicants they perceived as competition.
Women Are Happier With Less Attractive Spouses
A number of studies have shown heterosexual women with less pretty male partners tend to be happier and more satisfied. One study found that men who are less attractive tend to do other things to make up for that shortcoming, like taking the partners out on more dates or being better in bed, which translated to higher satisfaction for the women.
In another study, women were found to have more of a tendency to diet and try to look better if their husbands were more attractive than them. The surprising part is that this is not the case for men at all, which may tell us something about how looks disproportionately affect women in our society.
Attractive People Are Definitively More Boring
According to a study, beautiful people don’t tend to put in the inner work for improvement as much and are more inclined toward conformity than self-improvement. The more attractive people are, the less likely they are to do something to stand out, and the more likely they are to simply go with the flow.
Attractive Scientists Are Assumed To Be Dumber
Researchers took photographs of certain scientists and showed them to a group of people, asking them for their opinion on the quality of the scientists’ research. Surprisingly, the people deemed the unattractive scientists to be better at their jobs based on their photographs alone. While it may have to do something with the fact that scientists are more publicly visible now than ever before, the study suggests that we may be using attractiveness as a parameter for quality of performance in fields where it shouldn’t matter at all.
Unanimously Attractive Women Are Less Likely To Find A Date
In the world of online dating, it seems obvious that more attractive people would have a higher chance of scoring a date than less attractive ones. After all, it’s all about looks on dating apps, and even if personality may win once you do get to meet, the first matches are usually made purely on how conventionally attractive your potential date is.
While the data is pretty straightforward for men, for women, it’s a bit more complicated. As OKCupid found in their research, men are more likely to go for women who aren’t unanimously attractive. In other words, guys not being able to agree on whether a woman is attractive or not increases her chance of getting a date over women everyone finds attractive. Surprising, right? You might even doubt OKCupid’s credibility to carry out such research. Nevertheless, that’s what the data showed.
Women Prefer Men With Less Masculine Features For Long-Term Relationships
In a study done over a period of 15 years, a researcher from Glasgow University found that while women opt for more masculine men for casual flings and hookups, they tend to prefer men with moderately feminine traits for long-term relationships. There were certain conditions to the findings, like the self-perceived attractiveness of the female subjects, though overall, the findings suggest that men are better off toning down on the masculinity if they’re out to find a mate for life.[
