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Why your sexiest feature is your sense of humour

Do you and your partner laugh at all the same jokes? Recent Canadian research reveals why couples share their sense of humour.

Imagine you’re on a first date. You’ve gone to see a comedy. A few minutes in, you’re laughing so hard you start to cry. Your date, on the other hand, is stone-faced. Apparently, he doesn’t get the jokes. ‘You can probably imagine that he’s not feeling very drawn to you - and maybe you’re not attracted to him,’ says Canadian researcher Christian Hahn, who studies humour in relationships.

‘Wherever you go, if you ask people what’s attractive you might think it’s going to be tall, dark, and handsome, but more often than not it’s funny,’ Hahn told Love Matters. ‘People say, “I want someone with a good sense of humour.” ’

My Funny Valentine?

But what is a good sense of humour, exactly? Probably one that’s just like yours. ‘Similarity in humour seems to push that attraction even further than it already is,’ Hahn explains.

There’s plenty of research out there that shows we’re attracted to people who make us laugh. But how does this play out once two people are in a committed relationship? Do people actually want to spend their lives with funny partners, Hahn wondered.

To better understand the role of humour in long-term relationships, he tracked down 116 married couples who’d been together for an average of 13 years.

Four styles of humour

First, each partner answered questions that revealed what kind of humour style they had. Past research has found that people have four main styles of humour:

Bigging myself up: ‘If I’m someone who has a positive humour style it means that I’m going to rely more on self-enhancing humour – so building myself up. I’m going to tell a joke that’s self-promoting, not necessarily in an arrogant way,’ explains Hahn.
Cheering you up: There’s also 'affiliative humour', which simply means, ‘For example, if you’re having a bad day, I’m going to tell a joke to cheer you up.’
Putting myself down: ‘Then, on the flip side, there are the negative humour styles: self-defeating and aggressive humour,’ Hahn says. ‘Self-defeating humour is the person who uses humour to put himself down. For example before a presentation, he says, “Oh, it’s gonna be no good – I’ll probably go home and cry myself to sleep, haha.” That’s not really a positive way to use your humour.’
Putting you down: Aggressive humour involves putting other people down. ‘Sometimes it can be playful; sometimes it can border on other things. But sometimes humour is just plain aggressive,’ says Hahn.

Would married partners in the study have a similar sense of humour to one another and why? Hahn had a hunch that self-esteem might be involved, so he also had each partner answer questions related to how they viewed themselves.

There’s truth to the belief that couples enjoy the same kind of jokes, the research showed. The married partners in the study were likely to have similar humour styles to one another. People seem to look for long-term partners who use humour in the same ways they do, says Hahn. Interestingly, this was especially true for positive humour.

Laughing yourself closer

Why would couples have a similar sense of humour? Just as Hahn suspected, self-esteem has something to do with it. In the study, the higher it was, the more likely partners were to share their humour style. ‘That follows an old hypothesis called self-enhancement,’ he explains. ‘Basically, the more you like yourself, the more you’re going to want to be around people who are like you.’

But even people with lower self-esteem expressed humour in similar ways as their significant other. The reason seems obvious - it’s enjoyable to be with someone you can laugh with. Doing so is actually linked to feeling closer, research has shown. What’s more, people who share a sense of humour with their partner are more likely to think he or she is great and to have an optimistic outlook for the future of the relationship

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