Leon Foggitt

Couples

For years experts have been interested in physiognomy, the idea that we are given clues as to a person’s personality and temperament via the shapes and sizes of their facial features. In other studies, scientists found that people tend to be attracted to others with similar facial features to their own. There are a few explanations for this, for example we feel more comfortable around familiar faces i.e. for a man (his mothers face) and for a women (her fathers). Likewise it has been suggested that people may be attracted to someone with similar facial features to their own as this may imply their personality would be similar. This could result in the pair having greater shared interests, therefore relating to each other more easily.

This would explain why we are often attracted to a partner that we may share similarities with, both emotionally and physically. Another theory suggests that couples often begin to look more similar over a longer period of time spent together. This idea has many explanations, shared diet and environment will affect the physical appearance but of greater interest is the influence of empathy. In a relationship partners will often begin to develop the same emotional ideas and personality traits, then mirror each other’s facial expressions thus over time creating similar muscle patterns and lines on both partners faces.

With this in mind, I selected couples from my local area at random who had been together for a range of different time spans. My aim was to explore if similarities would be more evident in couples that had been together for a longer period of time. The majority of the couples in this series have been together for over 20 years, whether or not they look similar or not is open to debate.