Love is blind

Love for your partner makes everybody else less attractive

WASHINGTON: Love really is blind, at least when it comes to looking at others.

College students in love were less likely to take careful notice of other attractive men or women, the team at the University of California and dating website eHarmony found. “Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind,” said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony.

Gonzaga asked 120 heterosexual undergraduates in committed relationships to examine photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex from a website. They were asked to choose the most attractive photos, and write an essay either about their current romantic partner, or the subject of their choice.

They were asked to forget the “hotties” from the website, but told to put a check in the margins if they did happen to think of the attractive photos. “They could remember the colour of a shirt or whether the photo was taken in New York, but they didn’t remember anything tempting about the person,” Gonzaga said.