Imprinting

So I was musing about this imprinting thing, you know, the baby chick hatches & the first thing it sees, it thinks is it's 'mummy', even if it's a bare-assed baboon. What sparked this train of thought was a newspaper article this week about people who date folk who look like their parents...& brain went into gear. Through work, I've studied a lot of child & developmental psychology & theory of attachment, but not so much the sexual imprinting side of things as it was more the mother/child bond I was dealing with. And I've never really looked too deeply into why I am attracted to dark-haired men. So...

First of all, my husband looks nothing like my father, but my dad only came into my life when I was five. (Mum left my biological father just after I was born.) Before that, mum & I lived with my grandparents, so my surrogate father was my grandad, who had almost black hair. We lived in Malta...not many blondes there huh...one of my favourite photos is of me at a few months old with black-haired 'uncle' Manuel, probably the only other male I saw regularly. So no surprises there. What is surprising is how it can affect me. I was once in a supermarket with my baby son. A dark-haired lad kept passing me in the aisles & had an instantaneous effect. My face flushed, my stomach flipped, the whole array of physiological responses to a potential 'mate'. I ended up behind him at the checkout, wet & thoroughly worn out.

Adolescence was a dream for me during the eighties. Scotland was the land of mousey-brown or ginger-haired lads till then, but the punk & goth scenes changed all that. The local chemist regularly ran out of black hair dye & the lads in the years above me suddenly started to look appealing (or appealingly if I bothered to look out from behind my four-inch-long fringe). I was in a very conservative year at school, most of my friends parents were elders at church, so none of the boys had long hair, or god-forbid, dyed it. But the year above...they were like creatures from another planet...especially the punk who wore black drainpipe trousers with a tartan bumflap & lots of bondage straps. He earned his nickname when his dad burnt all his clothes on the bonfire & later joined the Military Police.

Some emulated the guys in certain bands, had an androgynous look & wore make-up. I had a huge crush on Phil Oakey from the Human League & spent, long, damp hours wondering what his 'Love Action' would be like. God I loved his voice!




Then I realised there was a lad at school who looked vaguely like him...beautiful, glossy, dark-brown, poker-straight hair with a long fringe & so First Boyfriend & I got together.