Gay men are attracted to guys who have this characteristic in common with their fathers, apparently

A new study has found that gay men are more likely to be attracted to a man who shares a notable characteristic with their father – eye colour.

The ‘Positive sexual imprinting for human eye colour‘ study by the University of Glasgow discovered that gay men were twice as likely to be coupled up with someone who had the same eye colour as their dad.

The study, which examined the links between romantic partners and parents, looked into sexual attraction using the ‘sexual imprinting’ theory, which hypothesises that humans decide which physical characteristics are attractive based on their parents.

Over 300 men and women were surveyed and asked about the eye colour of both their parents and partners, before the colours were split into two categories, ‘light’ (green, blue and grey) and dark (black, dark brown and light brown).

The data uncovered a trend where the eye colour of a person’s same-sex partner can be better predicted by the eye colour of their parent of the same sex.

This means, in short, that gay men appear to be more attracted to men that share the eye colour of their father, and lesbians to women who share the same eye colour as their mother.

Researchers said their findings showed “clear evidence against the sex-linked heritable preferences hypothesis, which predicts a relationship between partner’s eye colour and other-sex parent’s eye colour.”

They added: “Our data give clearest support to the positive sexual imprinting hypothesis, where we found that partner’s eye color was predicted by maternal eye color for people with female partners and by paternal eye color for people with male partners.”

The study also revealed that straight men and gay women are two-and-a-half times as likely to be partnered with someone with their mother’s eyes.

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