Tales of Romance, with Other Poems, Including Selections from Propertius

But we select nevertheless. If you measure enough couples, the answer that finally emerges is unexpectedly simple. On the average, spouses resemble each other slightly but significantly in almost every physical feature examined. That is true of all the obvious traits you would first think of when asked to design your ideal beloved—his or her height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, and skin colour—but it is also true of an astonishing variety of other traits that you probably would not have mentioned in your description of the perfect sex partner. Those other traits include ones as diverse as breadth of nose, length of ear lobe or middle finger, circumference of wrist, distance between eyes, and lung volume! Experimenters have made this finding for people as diverse as Poles in Poland, Americans in Michigan, and Africans in Chad. If you do not believe it, try noting eye colours (or measuring ear lobes) the next time you are at a dinner party with many couples, and then get your pocket calculator to give you the correlation coefficient ...»