There is no limit to the points of parental resemblance, real or imaginary, that the lover may find in the object of his (or her) love. The likeness may be extremely slight, something about the hair or its color, the eyes, the walk, an attitude, perhaps most often a similarity in the matter of figure. It is not a complete or definite personality, but rather a collection of idealized fragments.
Maybe there is usually a more tangible resemblance that we give the lover credit for. Years ago, Karl Pearson was puzzled to find that the color of eyes was more alike in man and wife than it should be in first cousins, according to biological theory. As a man tends to marry a woman resembling his mother, and a woman tends to marry a man resembling her father, the color of the eyes must be among the first of all likenesses seized upon to awaken the admiration that ripens into love. As the percentage of men who have inherited the color of eyes of their mother, and women the color of eyes of their father, is very great, it offers a practical theory for this point of common resemblance between husband and wife.
Fixations. When this unconscious idealization of the parent image is developed to an abnormal degree, so that it becomes a literal measure or precise pattern for comparing the love-object, instead of more or less a symbol, as it normally is, then we have a troublesome fixation. A great deal of unhappiness in many marriages is due to either the husband or wife being obsessed with a parent fixation. Naturally the spouse—the wife, for instance—does not measure up to the rigid standard of her husband's childhood ideal of the mother—who was sort of a super-being, because she supplied all wants—which still dominates his love-life.
The characteristic case is a neurosis, and it indicates that the subject has not modified or outgrown his conception of
