No one is saying anything, just watching him eat as if it’s some supernatural occurrence. “What?” Miya asks as he swallows his bite. Cherry’s is a little more subtle as he leaned against the counter, swirling his glass of wine. His eyes flicker between the two men as he chews, watching their smiles grow. The conversation dies the moment he takes a bite of the bread, the crunch like an explosion drawing everyone’s attention to the sound. Miya squeezes between the two men, reaching for the remaining piece of bread left on the plate. He is going to go disturb them and get them to cure his boredom. And now, boredom and a growing teenage appetite taking over, he’s going to grab the food and attention of the adults. He hadn’t even noticed the plate emptying itself until he was grabbing for more and was met with nothing but the porcelain bottom of his plate. Miya had had a plate of his own but he had since finished it, distractedly picking at it as he focused on his game. He makes a beeline for the counter where Joe and Cherry are sitting, chatting over a glass of wine and some finger foods that Joe had prepared a little earlier. Reluctantly, the boy pushes himself off of the floor. He’s bored of playing the same game, of playing the same level over and over again. All his losses had discouraged him and now, as he sits in silence in the corner of the small Italian restaurant, Miya feels the boredom sinking in. He couldn’t do it, no matter how hard he tried, and quite frankly, he wasn’t up to keep trying. He just couldn’t find its weak point, the weakness that would lead him to victory. No matter how many times he would try to change his strategy, that final wave would always beat him. The boy sets his game down, not ready to try for the sixth time. And just like that, he finds himself back to the title screen, the game’s title in bold letters and an arrow flashing and asking him if he wants to continue where he saved last. As he’s about to defeat the last of the enemies on screen, a new and stronger wave swoops in and annihilates him, destroying all his progress. It’s the fifth time he’s tried to beat the level but he just can’t seem to do it. He lets his head fall back against the wall behind him, groaning as he shuts his console. (Though much of the research in this area focuses on opposite-sex attraction, Fraley says he’s found no reason to assume this system works differently for gay men.Miya sighs as GAME OVER flashes across the screen of his Switch once more. Fraley thinks this tendency traces back to the environment where we grew up and points to preliminary findings about race and attractiveness: People reared in more racially diverse environments appear more likely to find people of other races attractive than people who grew up in racially homogeneous environments. Sure enough, subjects favored faces that included their own features. His research included a study that morphed a subject’s face into the face of a stranger, then asked the subject to evaluate the resulting face’s attractiveness on a computer screen. Chris Fraley, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There’s a lot of work suggesting that people are, in fact, attracted to people who look like them, and this is true over a wide swath of characteristics, from physical characteristics to morals and religious characteristics,” says R. Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins take that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own romantic clone. In one portrait after another, two men with similar expressions pose for the camera with complementary profiles that match all the way down to the chest hair. Behold the boyfriend twin.Īs the Tumblr that appeared recently asks, “What’s sexier than dating yourself?” Boyfriend Twin’s ever-growing scroll of photos seems to have charmed and terrified its devoted audience in equal measure, scratching at unconscious fears about how we choose our mates. Forget the homonymous gay couples, with their quaint troubles of shared first names and confused friends. When they kiss, they look like they’re doing an especially salacious rendition of the Marx Brothers mirror routine. Their facial hair was carved by the same blade. They have matching puffed-out chests, green plaid shirts, and endearing bedhead.