Skip to main content

As humans, we cannot help who we are attracted to. Some of us are attracted to the opposite sex, some of us are not, and well there is a lot of ‘in-between’ room.

Throughout the years though research has shown some pretty interesting things about human attraction and well, the overall population. For instance, a lot of people tend to seek out partners who kind of look like their parents. Yes, we tend to end up with partners that look like our parents be it our mothers or our fathers. 

According to Scientific American men tend to favor women who resemble their mothers and women tend to prefer men who resemble their fathers. While this might be a bit confusing and perhaps shocking for the majority it may be quite true. That being said, this could also be because they in some ways resemble us ourselves as we too tend to look like our parents in some ways. 

Something else that’s quite strange about attraction is that different scents also can incite different levels of attraction as a whole. Some women are more attracted to specific smelling men and vice versa. While we all like to smell good, we never really know if we’re smelling good to the people we want to smell good too. 

 Perhaps it should also be noted that gender attraction in itself has more behind it than we tend to assume. We actually may not even ‘consciously realize who attracts us’, according to Psychology Today. While men might be more able to detect their $exual attractions, that’s not something women seem especially keen to. This could break down a bit how women tend to be more flexible with their sexuality than men do. 

Psychology Today wrote as follows on that topic:

Researchers Chivers et al. (2004) presented straight men and women, as well as gay men and lesbians, with three different sexual films. One depicted two women; one featured one man and one woman; and the last involved two men. The researchers measured participants’ self-reported sexual arousal as well as genital arousal. The results for men were straightforward: Gay men exhibited more subjective and physiological arousal to the film involving two men, and straight men exhibited more arousal to the film involving two women. The authors’ findings regarding women, however, were surprising: Although lesbians thought they were more aroused by the film with two women, and heterosexual women thought they were more aroused by the film involving one man and one woman, both lesbian and heterosexual women were physiologically aroused by all three films, regardless of the gender of the actors.

Researchers believe that women’s $exuality is more fluid or flexible than men’s. And although they do not believe that women are inherently bisexual, they believe that women’s $exual attraction can shift more easily than men’s. This fluidity may have served an evolutionary purpose: Women whose male mates did not invest in their offspring may have benefited from forming partnerships with other women (Kanazawa, 2016; Kuhle and Radtke, 2013). Recent research suggests that some men do exhibit $exual fluidity as well (Katz-Wise, 2015).

Now, as if all of that wasn’t strange enough, Psychology Today also noted that women’s attraction varies depending on their menstrual cycle. Yes, your period might have more control than you realize. This has to do with hormones and things of that nature and is quite confusing but also very interesting. The more ‘fertile’ you are the higher you may end up rating your partner when it comes to how attractive they are. 

To learn more about how strange human attraction truly is take a look at the video below. Sure, it is a bit odd overall but it’s just how we are and there isn’t much we can do about it. Whether you’re straight, gay, bisexual, or anything else you’re just being yourself and there is nothing wrong with that, period.