London - There are many people who would probably prefer to forget about their first love, but it seems they may have a far greater impact on our later lives than most people would care to admit.
Researchers have found that our first boyfriend or girlfriend can play an important role in determining the kind of people we find attractive in later life.
The findings suggest there is a great deal of truth behind the old saying that we never really get over your first love.
Scientists found that even identical twins disagree on who they think is good looking, suggesting personal experience rather than genetics helps to determine what we find attractive.
Beyond a few simple rules – such as symmetry being considered generally a more attractive trait – it seems each of us seems to have a different 'type' that we are attracted to.
The findings may comfort those of us who are considered less conventionally attractive.
It may help explain why Colleen Rooney first began dating Wayne Rooney at the age 16 - long before he became a multi-millionaire footballer.
Laura Germain, a pyschologist at Harvard University who led the study with Jeremy Wilmer of Wellesley College, said: “If you think about your first romantic relationship, that person's face, or someone who looks like them, might be attractive to your for years to come.”
The researchers added: “We estimate that an individual's aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others.
“This fits with the common intuition that on the one hand, fashion models can make a fortune with their good looks, while on the other hand, friends can endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not.”
Most research has focused on the universal features of attraction, the authors write in their research published in Current Biology.
But by using an online quiz they tested 35 000 volunteers to discover what each individual found “hot” or not.
They also tested the preferences of 547 pairs of identical twin and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins by having them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces to see how much of the preferences could be put down to genetic reasons.
They found the uniqueness of an individual's face preferences - is mostly based on experiences, not our DNA, with even identical twins showing different preferences – showing that our evaluation of beauty is down to our personal experiences.
Dr Germine said: “The types of environments that are important are not those that are shared by those who grow up in the same family, but are much more subtle and individual, potentially including things such as one's unique, highly personal experiences with friends or peers, as well as social and popular media.”
The authors say that our ability to recognise faces is largely genetically determined – if your parents never forget a face, you will be more likely to be skilled at it.
So it makes it all the more unusual that whether we view the same faces as attractive or not is highly subjective.
The authors suggest that what you find attractive is less about how wealthy your parents are, the school you went to or the neighbourhood you grew up in, but more about the experiences that are unique to you.
These could be based on the faces you saw in the media when growing up, your unique social interactions each day – and even the face of your first boyfriend or girlfriend.
The authors say that future studies could look more closely at which aspects of the environment are really most important in shaping our preferences for certain faces and for understanding where our preferences for other things - like art or music or pets - come from.
Daily Mail