Young people want good-looking mates; their parents want them to have mates from the same social class
Posted by Mr. Thoughtful on June 4, 2008
Three psychologists in The Netherlands just published the results of a study on how young people’s preferences differed from their parents’ preferences on finding mates. The work, recently published in the Review of General Psychology, involved interviewing Dutch, American, and Kurdish young people and parents.
Not surprisingly, the young people wanted attractive mates while their parents mainly wanted the kids to have mates from similar social classes and groups:
… young people invariably considered the potential mate’s attractiveness the most important quality, whereas parents uniformly paid more attention to the suitors’ social background or group affiliation…
http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/may/15/checking-mates/?living
There’s no great surprise in these findings. It has been thoroughly proven that people who are dating and picking partners, both male and female, almost always want good-looking partners. For a review of the evidence for this proposition, see almost any of my posts on online dating and speed dating.
