It seems Freud really was right – we tend to look for partners that look like our parents, especially when it comes to eye colour.
New research has found men are drawn to lovers with the same colour eyes as their mother while women are drawn to men who have eyes the colour of their father’s.
The unsettling study confirms a theory known as ‘positive sexual imprinting’, whereby mammals choose their partners based on features of their parents.
It is a key part of a the Oedipal complex theory by Sigmund Freud.
Coined in 1910, the Oedipus complex suggests humans are unconsciously attracted to their parent of the opposite sex.
‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother’, said Sigmund Freud who came up with the idea that people had a desire to be sexually involved with their parent of the opposite sex.
Researchers form Glasgow University asked 300 men and women the colour of their parents’ eyes and those of their other half.
Researchers logged these colours into two groups – light (hazel, green, blue-green, blue and grey) and dark (black, dark brown and light brown).
Gay men and heterosexual women were twice as likely to have a lover with similar eye colour to their father, the study found.
Straight men and gay women were two and a half times more likely to have lovers with eye-colour similar to their mother’s.
‘Human romantic partners tend to have similar physical traits, but the mechanisms causing this homogamy are controversial’, researchers led by Lisa DeBruine wrote in online journal BioRxiv.
‘One potential explanation is direct matching to own characteristics.
‘Alternatively, studies showing similarity between parent and partner support positive sexual imprinting, where individuals are more likely to choose mates with the physical characteristics of their other-sex parent.’
The study supports the idea of ‘positive sexual imprinting’, which is the theory that animals chose mates that share attributes with their parents.
The research suggests that this phenomenon is all in the eyes and this is why we mimic Oedipal ideologies.
However, the researchers did not explain if there could be an evolutionary advantage in picking someone who might resemble a parent.
‘Here we show that partner eye colour was best predicted by the partner-sex parent’s eye colour’, researchers wrote.
‘Our results provide clear evidence against matching and sex-linked heritable preference hypotheses, and support the positive sexual imprinting hypothesis of the relationship between own and partner’s eye colour.’
In May this year, researchers claimed to have found ‘clear evidence’ for similarities between the faces of women’s brothers and their partners.
Although the idea of having a relationship with someone who looks like your sibling might be disturbing, partnering up with someone who looks like them could be a genetic advantage, researchers suggested.
Researchers from Northumbria University asked volunteers to rank the facial similarities between the brothers and boyfriends of a random selection of women.
‘We asked 32 women to pass on details of the study to their brother and male partner, who in turn supplied photographs of themselves’, Dr Tamsin Saxton from Northumbria University told MailOnline.
The 32 brothers were aged 18–40 and the 32 partners were aged 20–37.
‘In addition, 48 photographs (24 brothers, 24 partners) were located online by a researcher who had been instructed to find relatively recent facial photographs of brothers and partners of public figures or celebrities’, she said.
Participants were given a piece of paper with a picture of the brother of a women and four other men – one of whom was her partner.
They were then were asked to say which of the four other men resembled the brother the most.
The results showed there was ‘clear evidence for perceptual similarity in facial photographs of a woman’s partner and her brother’.
‘Although siblings themselves are sexually aversive, sibling resemblance is not’, researchers wrote in the paper which is published in Evolution and Human Behaviour.
‘Faces that subtly resemble family members could present useful cues to a potential reproductive partner with an optimal level of genetic dissimilarity’, they said.
People chose the picture of the partner as the one that was most similar to the brother 27 per cent of the time, which is only slightly above random chance.
‘So, I guess one important point is that you shouldn’t expect to be able to pick a partner simply based on the appearance of a sibling,’ Dr Saxton told Global News.
‘Not all women had partners that looked like their brothers… The point though is that it [may be] pretty weird to think that our partners might bear any resemblance whatsoever to our brothers — and an everyday prediction might be that partners and brothers wouldn’t look alike at all.
‘However, our study found that there was this subtle resemblance, on average, across the sample’, she said.