Why Women Seek Men Like their Fathers

Much has been said about the difficulty in understanding what women want in their relationships. While this may be true on a day-to-day basis, the choices that they make in terms of mates can more often than not be predicted on the basis of their emotional experiences during the formative years. One such factor is the role of the father and it is widely believed that women seek men like their dads when choosing a partner. Here are a few thoughts on whether this is true, and if so, the possible reasons behind the choice.

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Evidence in figures

That women seek men like their fathers for mates has been part of traditional wisdom in many societies but now even scientific research believes that there may be something to the notion. In 2010, The Daily Mail1 conducted a large-scale survey including 300 men and 400 women who were in a relationship and who had been brought up by two parents. The researchers asked the subjects to reveal their hair and eye color, as well as that of their partner and their parents. Based on this information, the survey concluded that the main predictor for the choice of a partner's eye and hair color - for both men and women - was the eye and hair color of the parent of the opposite sex. Thus a woman If a woman's father has dark hair and dark eyes, her partner is likely to have a similar  appearance just like a man would be more likely to choose a blonde, blue-eyed partner, if his mom has the same features. The other implication of the survey result was that the subject’s own hair and eye color, or those of the parent of the same sex, were far less important than that of the parent of opposite sex.

But women’s preference for men who look like their fathers goes beyond eye and hair color and includes wider facial similarities too. The Daily Mail article quotes a study by researchers at the University of Pecs, Hungary, which compared individual photographs of young, married couples with individual photographs of their parents at a similar age to them.
Participants in the study were asked to match up the newlyweds, and then pick out the couples' parents. While the first point of note was the resemblance between the partners themselves, an equally important result was the visual similarity between a man or woman’s partner and the parent of the opposite sex so that observers found that young women's fathers looked very similar to the men they married.

However, the participants of the study could not match the men’s fathers to the men's partners and vice-versa for women’s mothers and partners - which proves that people don't like faces simply because they resemble familiar family members. Instead the results are a definite proof of the fact that both men and women tend to be attracted to people who resemble the opposite sex parent.

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In case of women though, research has found an additional aspect, that women tend to choose mates who resemble their fathers, especially if they have had a positive relationship with their dads. In 20072, Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues at the University of Wroclaw and the Institute of Anthropology in Poland asked a trained anthropologist to perform facial measurements on the photographs of 15 random men as well as the photographs of the fathers of 49 Polish women participating in the study. On one side the researchers asked the women to rate how attractive they found each of the 15 random male faces and on another, the women were asked to rate their childhood relationships with their fathers. The women were split into two groups based on how positively or negatively they rated their relationships. At the end of the study, the researchers found that the women who had reported positive relationships with their fathers were much more likely to be attracted to men resembling their fathers while women with negative dad relationships did not find men who looked like their fathers appealing.

What the studies prove?

In humans like other highly evolved mammals, children learn life skills by observing their families at close quarters. The result is that characteristics of parents come to be imprinted in their minds as children; they remember and recognize their parents from a very early age and later go on to seek out mates whose features are reminiscent of their earliest caregivers. But this explanation does not indicate why daughters should seek out partners who resemble their dads and not their moms.

According to a theory posited by evolution psychology, a woman with a great dad is more likely to choose a similar-looking mate in the hopes that he will also be a good father to her children.

For even more plausible answer to this question, one would need to go back to gender and culture. A father is the first man a girl gets to know on intimate terms. He's bigger and stronger than mommy, and in the almost universal patriarchal set-up, wields the most power. He's around less often so that the little girl learns early on to understand her father's absences as evidence of his eminence in the outside world – according to her budding mind, if he's so important out there, he must be worth pleasing here, at home. Also many daughters idealize their fathers because they don't know them well enough to see their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities and their flaws. The father's fallibility remains elusive, and his daughter, perceiving his strengths but not his frailties, desires his approval and in adult relationships, unconsciously seeks to duplicate the relationship with a partner.

However with changing roles of dads at least in egalitarian societies and gender-neutral system of bringing up of children, women are finding out that though certain nurturing traits are common to men who make or have the potential to make good dads, their future partners need not be exactly like their fathers. These days, women are much more likely to look for a man who represents the best qualities of their father and avoid men who have the undesirable qualities their dads might have had. This may in fact be a good thing too, as a recent article from The Daily Mail3 suggests; about the subconscious preference of women for partners like their dads, the piece quotes Jennifer Harman, a psychology professor at Colorado State University and one of the contributors to the book, The Science of Relationships: Answers to Your Questions About Dating, Marriage and Family, as saying, 'It may or may not be a healthy dynamic, but it feels comfortable. If people don’t have a lot of self-worth because of early parenting, they enter relationships where that person confirms how they already feel about themselves.' Thus while a woman who had shared a good relationship with her dad would seek out someone like him in order to replicate the positive feeling in her romantic life too, even a woman who had a far-from-ideal relationship with her dad may, driven by a comfort factor, choose a similar partner and replicate the pattern – though unhealthy – all over again. This is probably why some women are attracted to hardcore alcoholics and no-gooders in their adult relationships even though they had been neglected by such fathers in their childhood.

In the end, though the early influences can be a determining factor in choice of a partner, the final success of a relationship really depends on the values, interests and priorities that two people share in their life together.

References:

Mail Online - Why women fall for men who look like their father... and other astonishing secrets of the science of attraction
 

Live Science- Women Prefer Men Who Look Like Dad
 

Mail Online - Why women seek men like their fathers and couples are less happy after marriage: New book explains science behind common relationship themes