I find this really fas­cin­at­ing. A couple of UK stud­ies sug­gest women from broken homes are ‘more mas­cu­line’ and hence ‘less attract­ive’ (pre­sum­ably to het­ero­sexual men). 

Even more fas­cin­at­ing to me is that the ‘ugli­est’ girls were those whose par­ents stayed together but had a poor relationship.

I remem­ber read­ing in a book my mother gave me as a teen­ager, Fam­il­ies and how to sur­vive them, that we rate others as attract­ive based on shared emo­tional his­tory as we can see muscle and pat­terns from exper­i­ence in faces. Could­n’t attract­ive­ness from broken homed people also simply be a sub­con­scious pro­cessing of the emo­tional pain in their his­tor­ies? The ques­tion for me is why that gets rated as ‘mas­cu­line’ in women and what it looks like in men…