Do you like your boyfriend because he looks like your father? This is the (somewhat disconcerting) question that we tackled in class this week. Similarity in mate partners, or homogamy, has been well documented in human sex partners. Choosing a mate with genetic similarity would mean that you would be more likely to share genes with your offspring. This week, we discussed an article that proposed that humans choose mates based partly on the mate’s similarity to their opposite-sex parent. The authors proposed that sexual imprinting occurs during childhood, leading humans to use their opposite-sex parent’s phenotype as a template for potential mates. In their study, the authors did find significant resemblances between fathers and their adoptive daughters’ husbands. This similarity diminished among daughters who reported receiving less emotional support from their fathers.
The idea of sexual imprinting is very intriguing to me. Do I really unconsciously choose boyfriends because they look like my father? Although I am now re-examining all of my past relationships, I am not completely convinced by the authors’ argument. They claimed that the daughters chose similar looking husbands not because of phenotypic matching to self, but because of phenotypic matching to their fathers. However, couldn’t husbands also look like their father-in-laws simply because daughters look like fathers, and daughters choose mates that look like themselves (the self-matching theory)? As confusing as it is to follow all of these daughters-to-husbands-to-fathers strands, I guess my point is just that there seems to be many ways that the causality of these similarities could go, and I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion of sexual imprinting.
If you’re interested, check out the article for yourself:
Bereczkei, Tamas, Petra Gyuris, and Glenn E. Weisfeld. “Sexual Imprinting in Human Mate Choice”, Proceedings: Biological Sciences. Vol. 271, No. 1544
