[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site. Sometimes with mean words. We love a strong woman (unless she happens to be charging at us with her fists raised), so we thought we'd give her a real forum to discuss her thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. Every Friday I'll be featuring a hot topic (like don't ask, don't tell!) and leaving it up to you, the readers, to duke it out. So, read it and get your debate on in the comments section below!]

In ‘studies that make my skin crawl’ news, researchers at the University of Pecs (please excuse me while I go find a school transfer form. Pecs, here I come!) in Hungary found that most people they studied wind up in long-term relationships with a partner who resembles their opposite sex parent. Basically, that means that most women end up married to a man who physically resembles their father, which is… ick. Just ick. The question is, do we think this is really accurate, or did something go horribly awry in this study?

On the one side, the people we grow up around naturally shape some of our ideas. I, for example, come from a family of big burly guys, so if you asked me “what does a guy look like” my baseline would be 6 feet tall, 200 pounds. Since our parents are with us since, well, birth, it’s natural that their influence would be stronger still. These people shape, not only our personalities and our ideas, but also our aesthetic preferences. Maybe it’s not that we go for someone who looks like our dad, but just that we’ve learned to see our fathers as handsome and by that virtue, men who look like dad are good-looking too.

On the other side though, I question whether that really defines who we end up with. Like I said, my baseline for a guy is reasonably specific, but not all of the guys I’ve dated actually fall into that range, and I certainly wouldn’t avoid dating guy for that reason. In fact, in my experience, women are much less likely to abide by a ‘type’ than guys are, so ultimately it seems really unlikely that we all happen to end up with guys who look like our dads.

There’s also something in there that’s maybe even more disturbing than the Freudian implications of this study, which is – it suggests that the person we end up with is largely predetermined by their looks. Because I needed a nice dose of ‘you’re biologically shallow’ for the day.

What do you think? Do you go for guys who remind you of dear old dad? Do you find that too creeptastic for words? Do you have a type? The future of our relationships hang in the balance – duke it out!

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In the classic tragedy of OEDIPUS, in which we find an incestuous relationship at its core, Oedipus marries his mother, Queen Jocasta, after killing his father, King Laius of Thebes. Their true identities are only known to the reader, making the story all the more gruesome to read. They unwittingly marry one another, unaware that they are related by blood. When Oedipus realizes that he’s married his own mother and that he killed his true father, he stabs his eyes out.

It’s a classic tale of unnatural consummation, and the results are disastrous.

Fast forward to the early twentieth century. Location: Austria. Freud’s interest in the development of children vis-à-vis the “Oedipus complex” is immortalized. The concept is still discussed in highly intellectual circles, and the term is also tossed about in mundane, everyday life jabbering.

In simplest terms, Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of this complex is dichotomic – there are two opposing emotional poles. One pole is bent on a wish for one parent to die, while the other pole is the realm of love and absolute adoration for the other parent. This love is connected to sexual desires, albeit juvenile, for the other parent.

The hatred is directed toward the father, and the love is connected to the mother (the maternal source that granted the child life). These desires, i.e. the wish to kill their father in order to have complete access to their mother’s love and affections, are short lived. But what happens when this complex is inverted and, let’s say, the father goes after his own daughter?

Fast forward again. This time to 2008, but let’s stay in the same location: Austria. The man, Josef Fritzl, inverted the oedipal complex, and a most horrifying story has surfaced in Austria, the birthplace of Freud. At the age of 73, Fritzl was recently arrested. He confessed to fathering 7 siblings with his own daughter! His daughter, Elizabeth F., was kidnapped by her own father in 1984. She was drugged and locked up in a cellar below their home. He raped her repeatedly. Her mother, meanwhile, believed that Elizabeth had run away. A few of the children were “dumped” off at the parents’ doorstep with notes on them that claimed that Elizabeth had joined a cult, and was not allowed to raise her children.

Three others stayed with the mother in the sound proof dungeon, a light-free prison only accessed by Fritzl. At one point a child died shortly after its birth, and Josef Fritzl told authorities that he had incinerated the body shortly thereafter. He is now the most famous criminal in the world.

I simply can’t wrap my head around this story. The children who stayed in the cellar with their mother were recently exposed to the world. They’d never seen LIGHT before! It’s cruel beyond words. I am at a loss to understand this Herr Fritzl.

My dad is not hot.

My best friend’s dad… well, that’s another story. Any of these dads… definitely doable.

But my dad… not at all.

Sucks for me because, according to a recent study, I’m more likely to date guys who are daddy look-a-likes.

The study found that women who had good childhood relationships with their fathers were often attracted to men who resembled their dear old daddies. The same did not go for women with bad father-daughter relationships.

And of course, I am the ultimate daddy’s girl. Grrreat.

This concept has been in the works since Freud but the researchers behind the new study say that their results “show for certain that the quality of a daughter’s relationship with her father has an impact on whom she finds attractive.”

It seems that I may have to brace myself for a skinny Jewish analyst in my future.

So, to my fellow daddy’s girls: next time you see your dad, take a good look at that face because some resemblance of it will likely find its way into your love life.

Ugh… it’s going to be an awkward Father’s Day dinner.