Jean Hannah Edelstein in the Guardian:
For a short time a couple of years ago, I dated a nice young man who looked exactly like my father. In my defence – a defence that I had to voice quite often after my dependably hilarious parents located a photograph of the nice young man on the internet and emailed me a near-identical picture of my father, circa 1974 – we met on a blind date. I felt that this detail rendered our liaison less creepy than if I had fallen him after spotting him from across a crowded room. But only a little less creepy. Sometimes, despite my best efforts to ignore the familiarity of the structure of his cheekbones, the shape of his nose, and the placement of his eyebrows, I would find myself gazing at my suitor’s handsome face, quite smitten, but also quite worried that he might be my half-brother.
My romantic interlude with the dad-esque man didn’t last very long – no doubt he could smell that our pheromones were just too similar – but I have remained slightly haunted ever since by having dated my father’s doppelganger. Until yesterday, that is, when was I absolved from responsibility for it by science: researchers in Hungary published findings that demonstrate that my unnerving attraction was far from unusual. According to their study, women are inclined to choose partners whose faces resemble those of their fathers, and vice versa with men – further confirming previous theories of so-called sexual imprinting, which hold that people who have good relationships with their parents tend to be attracted to partners who strongly resemble them.