Chapter 1

Have you ever noticed that a man and woman who have been married for forty or fifty years look an awful lot like each other?

It's true! Look in the paper at the people who are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Look at pictures of your great grandparents, or grandparents, assuming they were only married to each other. I'm talking here primarily about facial features, and not necessarily the rest of the body.

But it only seems to be true for people who have been married for a really long time. The funny thing is that even though they LOOK alike, they may be as different from each other as it's possible to be. I know you've heard old couples arguing, right? I mean look at Frank and Marie on "Everybody Loves Raymond". Married forever and fight like cats and dogs.

Before you write and tell me what a piss poor example they are, let me remind you I know they AREN'T actually married to each other. That's why they don't look alike. They're just actors. But their lines come from real history. The writers are just remembering what their own parents and grandparents were like. Trust me on that.

Anyway, when I first noticed this phenomenon, I got sort of fascinated by it. And everywhere I looked it was the same. People who were together a long time looked alike.

Eventually I came up with two possible hypotheses, or questions:

1. Are people who look alike attracted to each other, and BECAUSE of that they stay together forever?

If true, you could hypothesize that, if two people look like each other, they might be able to make a long lasting marriage.

2. Or, is it that they were they attracted by something else and ended up looking alike BECAUSE they lived together for so long?

In this case, the looking alike part wouldn't mean anything, except that you could tell who had been married a long time just by looking. Big deal.

So, when I was in college, working on a double Master's in Sociology and Psychology, and had to do a research project, I thought to myself: "Self ... why not do some research on that?" If I worked it right I could submit the same project to both review boards. I know it was an "iffy" thing to do ethically, but I was overworked and poor and ... well that's what I did.

That, of course, required that I have something I could research. I mean putting a bunch of pictures of married geezers together would be easy, but it wouldn't prove anything. So I thought about looking at a variety of groups of married people, including younger couples, to see if they looked similar or not when they got married, and then MORE like each other the longer they were married. Who knows, maybe there was a way to quantify whether or not a marriage was more or less likely to succeed, depending on the similarities of facial features. Stranger things have made a million dollars.

So I put an ad in the paper, asking for married volunteers to provide me with information about how they met, and who had photographic documentation of what they looked like when they met, as well as additional photographs taken since they had been married. I should have put more in the ad, but it cost per word, so I kept it to a minimum. It didn't actually explain in the ad what I was trying to do. That I could do in person, and it would be a lot cheaper.

And then I began doing interviews.

That's when it all went ... well ... different than I thought it would. What happened was that I got laid. I know that sounds weird, but it's what happened. And not just once either. I couldn't put that part in the paper, of course, but it's kind of interesting, and definitely says something about the culture in which we live.

So I thought you might be interested in how that came about.

But, let me start at the beginning. I know I already told you the beginning. I mean the beginning of actual work on my masters thesis, which was titled:

"QUANTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF PROBABILITY PATTERNS BASED ON VISUAL CUES IN FACIAL ANATOMICAL SIMILARITIES OF MALES AND FEMALES IN LONG TERM RELATIONSHIPS"

Impressive, huh? You have to have an impressive title to get the attention of the review committee. Or to confuse them so much that they don't know whether you actually did what you claim to have done or not.

In either case you hope for a good grade and mention in one of the journals.

I won't bore you with all the analytical stuff in the paper. But you might be interested in the interviews ... and what happened during some of them.

I know it blew my young mind away.

Tanya and Ralph

Tanya and Ralph were about as different looking as a couple could be. She was twenty-seven, and one of those dark redheads, with hair so richly burnished that it actually shone when light bounced off of it. It was cut in what used to be called a pageboy and it flipped and flew every time she moved her head, like it was trying to escape from her scalp and fly off somewhere. She moved her head a lot too. She was a very expressive woman and was one of those people who talk with their hands a lot. Whenever she talked her hands moved, swinging across her body, or jabbing out to make a point, waving around and drawing the eye.

That was fortunate for me, because it gave me lots of opportunity to stare in the direction of her chest, where those hands were waving around. Tanya was also one of those women whose breasts are just small enough and very healthy, so that they didn't really need a bra. And she never wore one during any of our interviews. This was made obvious by sharply defined nipples that poked proudly through anything she wore, including sweatshirts if they weren't too loose. While she wasn't boyish, by any stretch of the imagination, she had slim hips and looked like she might weigh a hundred pounds if she were carrying a box of books. Her eyebrows were darker than her hair, and she cut them or clipped them or whatever women do to eyebrows so that they started above her nose, curved up, then down and then up to a point at the outside. It made her look like she was always asking a question. She had dark green eyes, and the whole package was one that just shouted energy and vitality. She worked part time as something called a "wire puller" for a cable installation company.

Ralph, on the other hand, was at least six feet tall, a good foot taller than his wife. He probably wore size 48 shirts. But for his sandy colored hair and beard, and his pale blue eyes that looked like what I'd expect to see in a serial killer's face, he reminded me of a hulking gorilla that had learned to imitate a man. He unloaded trucks for a living and it showed. Whatever was on those trucks, there were a lot of them, and they were heavy. His eyes looked sleepy a lot of the time, but he was a sharp cookie.

Tanya and Ralph had been married for four years, and he was four years older than she was. They had no children, according to the application form they'd filled out.

I did all the interviews at the couple's residences, because I thought that might make them more comfortable. I had a list of questions, but they were designed more to break the ice and get people talking than to actually gather information for the study. I had been told by my advisor that if I could get people to trust me, they'd babble about anything in their lives.

Little did I know just how right that guy was.

"So, how did you two meet?" was my first question.

Tanya's hands darted around. "He saved my life!" she said, excitedly, like it had just been a week ago. "My car slid on some ice and went into the river and he jumped in and pulled me out."

"Wow" I said.

Ralph had a surprisingly soft voice for a big man. "It wasn't anything." he said. "Anybody would have done it."

He got a slap on the arm from his wife. "Saving my life wasn't some small thing!" she said. "It's not like you were just bending over to pick up some trash."

And just like that they were involved in an argument. It was obvious to me that it was a long running argument too, that had never been resolved for some reason.

The budding psychologist in me recognized that there were underlying stresses in this relationship. They couldn't still be arguing about something that happened four years ago ... and had gotten married after.

"Let's move on" I suggested. They were both a little huffy now, darting looks at each other. "What was it that attracted him to you?" I asked Tanya.

"It was cold, and I knew I was dying. It got all dark and I felt a hand grab my shoulder." she said.

I could tell she was reliving the experience. There was a kind of horror in her eyes.

"I woke up coughing and his face was right above mine, dripping water on me. There was something in his eyes ... hope or something."

"I had to do mouth-to-mouth on her." Ralph said, filling in the blank.

"And I knew he had saved me, but I was so cold and shivering so much that I couldn't talk." she finished. "And the ambulance came and when they put me in the back, he got in too and went with me to the hospital and waited until they told him I was going to be OK. He was still in his wet clothes with a blanket wrapped around him, but he waited." she said. "He even went out and got me new clothes so I wouldn't have to go home wet." Now her eyes had what could only be called devotion in them as she stared at her husband. "And I knew I wanted him in my life forever ... that I wanted him to father my babies." The light dimmed in her eyes and she looked away from him.

Ralph had slumped there at the last. Their reaction to the last part of the story was palpable.

I turned to Ralph. "And you?"

He leaned back in the chair. "She was so light, and beautiful ... even wet and muddy from where I had to pull her ashore. And when she coughed and started breathing again I felt like it was a miracle. I was going with another girl at the time, but it just seemed shallow and empty compared to what had just happened." He smiled. "She just stole my heart. I couldn't think of anything but her for days. So I called her, on the excuse of finding out how she was doing."

Tanya took over the story again. "And he was so cute and shy on the phone, so I told him he had to let me cook him dinner ... to pay him back. And he came over and as soon as I saw him I forgot all about dinner. It burned..." she blushed.

"We kind of got carried away." said Ralph.

"So it was love at first sight?" I asked.

"I guess you could call it that." said Tanya. "I was a virgin when I met him. Hadn't even thought about really trying to have a serious relationship - I was kind of shy."

"You weren't shy that night." said Ralph, grinning.

"All I did was give you a "thank you kiss", you beast." she said, waving her hands. "And the next thing I knew we were in bed and you were doing horrible things to me!"

"You tore three buttons off my shirt!" he objected. "I couldn't have fought you off if I had a battalion of Marines backing me up!"

I realized my mouth was open. Ralph could break his wife in two if he wanted to. But then, trying to imagine the scene they were describing, if I'd have been him, I wouldn't have struggled too hard. She was a good looking woman.

Tanya tossed her head and sniffed. She looked at me like she'd just remembered I was there. "Anyway, after he had his way with me..." She grinned sideways at him and slapped him lightly on the arm again, "I told him he had to marry me because my life was his. It's an old Chinese custom."

"You don't look Chinese" I commented, joking.

"You don't have to BE Chinese to think it's a good custom." she replied tartly.

Ralph just looked up at the ceiling.

"So you proposed to him the second time you ever saw him." I prompted.

"No, I demanded that he propose to ME the second time I saw him." she corrected me.

"And you did?" I said to Ralph.

"Definitely!" he said. "And it wasn't hard at all. Except when I had to tell Trudy we couldn't go out any more because I was engaged. She was my girlfriend ... well the girl I had been going out with ... you know what I mean."

Tanya looked smug.

I asked them some more questions and then gave them some questions to think about before the next interview. Then I asked them why they wanted to be in a study about married people who looked alike when they didn't actually look alike.

Tanya looked surprised. "I thought this study was about trying to see what your children would look like."

"Uh ... no." I said. I was caught off guard. "It's to see if people who get married look alike when they do that, and look more and more alike as the years go by."

"Oh." Tanya was obviously disappointed. Her head came up. "But we don't look anything alike!" she said. Maybe she missed my earlier statement.

"I would have to agree with that." I said, trying to be nice.

"Why would it matter if people looked alike?" she asked.

So I explained my theory about how I thought if people looked alike they were more likely to have really long marriages.

That just made them both look uncomfortable.

"Look," I said, "It's just a theory. There's no reason in the world why you two won't stay happily married for fifty years. I could be wrong about the whole thing."

"I told you this was a bad idea." said Ralph to his wife. "It's just going to make things harder."

That was a singularly odd thing for him to say, in my book. I mean why would being in a study that THEY thought would tell you what your kids might look like be such a terrible thing. The question must have shown on my face.

Ralph slumped again. "I can't give her any children." he said.

"We don't know that!" Tanya objected.

"Yes we DO!" Ralph said emphatically. "We've been through all the tests. If my sperm count was any lower I'd start growing breasts." he said.