In 2016, Olivia Brunner, like millions of Americans, decided to take an at-home DNA test. But Brunner wasn’t motivated by pure curiosity. She bore a striking resemblance to her then-boyfriend, Greg — from their hair colors and complexions down to their facial expressions — and for years, people had commented that they looked related. She needed to confirm, for her own peace of mind, that they weren’t — especially since she had been adopted as a baby.
“In the back of our minds we were like, ‘What if there’s this tiny little chance that we actually are somewhat related?'” Brunner, 26, remembers. “It got pointed out to us too much for us to not be worried about it. I don’t know what we would have done.”
Their worries turned out to be for nothing, and the New Hampshire couple married last year.
Today, their uncanny resemblance is just “an inside joke that everyone can be a part of,”
Greg, 26, says. “The only time it really comes up is when we say, ‘What are our kids going to look like?’ Well, they’re going to look like us.”
Lookalike couples have captured public fascination for years. Back in 1987 , scientists from the University of Michigan set out to study the phenomenon of married couples who grow to look more alike over time. (Their theory, which scientists still cite today, was that decades of shared emotions result in a closer resemblance due to similar wrinkles and expressions.) More recently, social media has amplified romantic doppelgängers through viral posts and channels like the Tumblr
Boyfriend Twin, which celebrates gay couples who resemble each other. But how do so many lookalikes end up together in the first place?
Despite the old notion that opposites attract, Indianapolis-based social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, who is a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of Tell Me What
You Want, says people naturally gravitate toward people who are familiar, even though the whole process is likely subconscious. There are some traits that work best in a relationship when they’re balanced out by an opposing partner — like dominance and submissiveness
— but, by and large, “what is familiar to us tends to be what we like and are drawn to,” even if we’re not explicitly aware of it,
Lehmiller says.
That phenomenon extends to appearance. “You’re familiar with your own appearance, so seeing other people who share those similar sorts of traits might lead to more liking for that reason,” he says.
One 2013 study found that to be true. In the experiment, people were shown images of their romantic partner’s face that had been digitally altered to include some features from another face — either random other faces, or the study participant’s own face. Both male and female participants consistently rated the composite that included their own face as the most attractive love zone
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