Freud was right - lovers only have eyes for mumor dad

Freud would be pleased. Oedipus would be wearily unsurprised. The rest of us might be mildly unsettled.

If you gaze deeply into the eyes of your love, what do you see? Well, whatever the poets tell you, the chances are what you see is either your mumor your dad.

A study has found that heterosexual men and gay women are drawn to a partner with the same eye colour as their mother, while heterosexual women and gay men look for a man whose eye colour is that of their father.

Whether it is George Clooney marrying a wife whose eyes match the deep chestnut of his beauty queen mother, or Angelina Jolie seeing the grey-blue of her father Jon Voight mirrored in her onetime love Brad Pitt, when it comes to dating we all subconsciously return to our childhood.

The scientists, from Glasgow University, came to this conclusion after asking 300 men and women about the eye colour of their parents and of their other half. They found that people were about twice as likely to hook up with someone whose eyes matched a parent - with the relevant parent being the one who correlated with their sexuality.

In doing so, they helped partially validate an old theory. It was Sigmund Freud who first identified the Oedipus complex, which he named after the Greek character who unwittingly married his mother.

"His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours - because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him," said the psychoanalyst.

"It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother," added Freud who, while happy to imagine being sexually attracted to his own mum, clearly could not imagine that some of the audience for his theories might be women.

This is not the first research to find evidence for unconscious parental attraction. Past studies have found that among heterosexual couples the facial structure of the husband is more similar to that of the wife’s father than you would expect by chance. The same is true the other way round. The idea is that, much as Freud suspected, when children we learn to view our parents as models for our future mates.

However, a criticism of previous work attempting to show this is that it does not preclude another, arguably equally creepy explanation. Perhaps instead of heterosexual women learning to look for their father, they inherit the preferences of their mother.

The latest experiment, published in the preprint journal Biorxiv, cleverly teased out the difference between the competing hypotheses by including homosexuals as half of the participants.

If men inherit the preferences of their father, then you would expect homosexual men to go for other men with the eyes of their mother.

But in the new research they didn’t - they went for those of their father.