We ‘rate our partners more attractive than strangers do’

London: Every person falls in love with someone or the other but ever wondered what keeps the relationship strong? Well, it’s the way you look at your partner.

Scientists have confirmed that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder after finding that people rate their partners more attractive than strangers do. They also reported that this “positive illusion” about a partner`s hotness might help keep relationships stable, reports the Daily Mail. Earlier studies had suggested that people rated their partners as especially kind and intelligent compared with other people but it was not known if this positive outlook extended to physical looks. According to Livescience, researchers from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands tested the idea with 70 heterosexual couples. All the volunteers had their photograph taken, then half of the couples filled out a questionnaire about their ratings of their own attractiveness and their partner`s attractiveness. Next, they filled out some dummy questionnaires about other topics to throw them off the scent of the experimental question. After that, they got to look at the photo of themselves and their partners taken at the beginning of the session and were told to rate the attractiveness of both. The other couples completed the same process, but looked at the photos first. The results showed that both men and women consistently rated both their own hotness and that of their partner higher than the strangers did. The researchers had thought that people might rate the photographs more objectively, since photos make awkward features hard to ignore, but that wasn`t the case. Attractiveness ratings based on photos were only slightly lower than attractiveness ratings based on people`s own memories. ANI