There’s having a physical type ― tall, dark and bearded, for instance ― then there’s dating someone who looks so much like your ex (or exes, plural), they could be twins. Call it doppelgänger dating.
There’s plenty of examples of doppelgänger dating among celebrities and other public figures: Earlier this month Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) announced on Instagram that he was engaged to Alexis Lewis, a real estate agent who bears such a striking resemblance to his ex, actress Rosario Dawson, some commented that they thought it was Dawson: “I was like, Rosario looks great! But then I saw the caption,” one commenter said.
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Then there’s Kanye West. Since his divorce from Kim Kardashian, the rapper has dated a string of women who bear a resemblance to the reality star. (He ended up marrying one such Kim K look-alike, Aussie architectural designer Bianca Censori, in 2022.)
It happens in non-celebrity circles, too: Caitlin, a 28-year-old, said two exes have dated dark-haired, blue-eyed women who could pass for sisters post-breakup.
“My one ex’s wife looks so similar to me: same face shape, same eyes, same hair color, likes to do makeup, makes the same face I make in photos,” Caitlin told HuffPost. “She even has a similar job: I’m an esthetician and she does nails.”
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She felt a bit weird about the resemblances at first ― “I thought they must have been trying to find another me” ― but then she realized she was doing the exact same thing in her own dating life: Swiping right and crushing on tall, dark and handsome types who wore glasses, just like her exes.
The way Caitlin sees it, the look-alike quality gives new guys a subtle advantage, subconscious brownie points men don’t know about.
“I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think that someone that looks like someone you were in love with subconsciously creates this safe and familiar feeling,” she said. “I think my body is more attracted to someone that looks like my ex.”
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Of course, there needs to be an emotional connection for an actual relationship to work, she said.
Xavier, 27, found out through mutual friends that his ex-girlfriend was seeing a guy who looked like him. What added insult to injury was that he’d met the guy before.
“It was a rollercoaster, finding out,” he said. “He looks exactly like me but just shorter ― I’m around 6’1,” Xavier told HuffPost. “He has the same haircut as me at the time, style of tattoos, music interest, hobbies interest, you name it. It sucks because we could’ve been best friends.”
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In the end, he said, he can’t hate the new relationship. Everyone has their preferences.
“It’s just like how frat bros always date the same type of girls over and over,” he said. “I’d also say geography, finances, and status plays a huge role in influencing our decisions on who we date.”
There’s a reason we date people who look like our exes, according to evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary psychologists tend to agree. When dating, birds of a feather really do usually stick together, said Glenn Geher, a professor of psychology and the director of evolutionary studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
“In research on the social psychology of intimate relationships, there has been a long-standing debate as to whether people tend to choose partners who are like themselves as opposed to partners who are clearly different from themselves,” he said.
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Most research lands at the former, he said: “We tend to end up with partners who reflect ourselves in many ways.”
That’s because, generally speaking, people tend to date close to home. And people who are similar on a host of demographic factors tend to live near each other, explained Paul W. Eastwick, a professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the upcoming “Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.”
“So this form of ‘demographic sorting’ creates couples who will be — and often look – similar to each other,” Eastwick told HuffPost.
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There’s another factor at play, the professor told HuffPost: Attractive people tend to date other attractive people.
“People who are more attractive tend, on average, to be successful at wooing other attractive partners,” he said. “Attractiveness matching applies mostly to first impressions, but it nevertheless makes a difference in the aggregate. So of course, Cory Booker’s partners are going to be attractive like him, on average.”
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We’re also drawn to people who look like us, the theory of assortative mating tells us. (Never mind the Rosario Dawson resemblance, when you look at Booker and his new fiancée, they could pass for siblings: Same toothy smiles, same skin tone.)
As Madeleine A. Fugère, a professor of social psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University, told HuffPost in 2018, “evolutionary speaking, genes that are somewhat similar to our own (but still different enough from our own) may be optimal for reproductive success.”
“Some researchers believe that stimuli which we see frequently may be more easily processed by the brain as well,” she told us. “It is also possible that we feel more trust for individuals who seem more familiar to us.”
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Blaine Anderson, a matchmaker in Austin, Texas, uses having a type to her benefit in her matching: She usually asks her clients to share a photo of an ex, to help her calibrate their physical type and find potential matches.
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“Clients will give me specific physical criteria all the time: They’ll say something like ‘blonde, fit, big boobs,‘” Anderson said. “But guess what? They still really want the date with the beautiful brunette who looks like she’s an A cup. It’s easy to exaggerate the extent to which ‘type’ matters.”