Boys fancy girls who look just like their mums
There’s a little bit of Oedipus in all of us
Jack CummingsWe’re more attracted to girls who are the double of our mums, according to horrifying new research.
Apparently evolution and natural selection convinces us to seek out partners who look “significantly” like our parents.
And since our earliest and closest contact is with our mums, girls who resemble her become the ideal choice, scientists say.
But no matter how dedicated they are, poor dads leave no impact on their daughter’s choice of boys.
You probably won’t want to mention this to your girlfriend
Researchers at the University of Turku in Finland rounded up 70 men and women and compared the face of each person’s choice of partner next to their opposite-sex parent.
While the girls picked boys who looked nothing like their dads, the guys had all picked partners who “significantly” resembled their mums.
In her research, Dr Urszula Marcinkowska from Turku University said: “Positive sexual imprinting is a process by which individuals use the phenotype of their opposite-sex parent as a template for acquiring mates
“We found that there was no perceived facial similarity between women’s partners and their fathers.
“However, men tended to pair more often with women that were perceived as resembling the men’s own mothers.
“In contrast to previous studies, the quality of the relationship between participants and their parents did not predict the level of facial resemblance between the participant’s spouse and their parent.”
What have you done mum?
This isn’t the first time boys have been accused of fancying girls who look like their mums.
Back in 2008 psychologists measured people’s faces and compared them with their partner’s parents and strangers.
They found boys were more likely to pair up with girls whose bone structure was similar to their own mums.
What’s more, the girls also appeared to go for boys who resembled their dads.
Named “sexual imprinting”, the strange theory suggests the faces we find attractive as adults are already set from childhood.
The researchers at Pecs University in Hungary claimed the effect was not down to familiarity alone, otherwise boys would be chasing girls who looked like their dads too.