If your love life is already perfect, you can stop reading. If it looks more like everyone else's, get ready: this may change the way you think about attraction.
How do people choose one another? Why can one person become fixated on someone who feels indifferent, while overlooking another person who is genuinely interested?
Everyone has a theory. Here is an answer grounded in research.
There is a word for it: imprinting.
Imprinting is a specific form of learning in animals and humans in which the characteristics of important objects—parents, partners, food sources, or threats—become fixed in memory.
The term emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, but only much later was it applied to human attraction.
Biologist Konrad Lorenz studied the behavior of birds. He showed that a newly hatched bird could follow the first moving object it saw as though it were its mother. Birds raised only around humans sometimes failed to recognize their own species as potential mates.
Birds may seem far removed from us. But what does this have to do with people?
The surprising answer is: more than we might think.
Early unconscious impressions connected with affection and sexuality form during a sensitive period and can influence later partner choice. In human relationships, this is one way to understand imprinting.
Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung described such an early image in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
When my mother was away, our maid looked after me. I still remember her taking me and laying my head on her shoulder. She had dark hair and dark skin and looked nothing like my mother. I can still see the line of her hair, her neck, the marks on it, and her ear. This type of woman later became part of my inner world—my anima.
Folk wisdom often says that men choose women who resemble their mothers and women choose men who resemble their fathers. The idea is broader than that: the important image may come from another meaningful adult, and “resemblance” can be subtle.
An entire appearance can be imprinted, or only one meaningful feature—a profile, the shape of a nose, or even a familiar scent. The difficulty is extracting that image from memory and describing it well enough to compare.
Now imagine an algorithm that can infer a compatible partner from such imprints: they resemble the ideal image formed in us, while we resemble the image formed in them. The two people can then talk and decide whether to meet.
That is the idea behind Unison. Instead of endless trial and error, the service introduces people for whom mutual attraction may have a deeper foundation.
Why has dating rarely worked this way? Most services do not explain how attraction and filtering operate, and users are rarely asked to think about it. We will explore the consequences—and our alternative—in later articles.
Choice as Imprinting: Why We Are Here
We choose and are chosen. But what unconscious mechanisms make one person unforgettable while another leaves us unmoved?
People have asked this for centuries. Writers, poets, and philosophers have offered countless answers. Ours sits at the intersection of biology and depth psychology: imprinting.
From a biological perspective, imprinting is a special form of learning in animals and humans: the characteristics of parents, partners, food sources, and recurring threats are fixed in memory.
Konrad Lorenz introduced the term while studying birds. A newly hatched chick shown a moving object instead of its mother could follow that object as though it were the parent. Birds raised only among humans sometimes failed to recognize their own species as potential mates.
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Humans also form early unconscious impressions connected with affection and sexuality. During a sensitive period, these impressions can shape later partner choice. Put simply, the image of a loved person may be influenced by a significant early image.
Carl Gustav Jung wrote about this in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
When my mother was away, our maid looked after me. I still remember her taking me and laying my head on her shoulder. She had dark hair and dark skin and looked nothing like my mother. I can still see the line of her hair, her neck, the marks on it, and her ear. This type of woman later became part of my inner world—my anima.
People often say that men choose women like their mothers and women choose men like their fathers. This is an oversimplification: another meaningful adult may shape the image, and resemblance may be indirect.
An entire appearance can be imprinted, or a single significant feature such as a profile line or a scent. The larger challenge is description: an unconscious image must first be retrieved, interpreted, and made comparable.
Imagine an algorithm that can infer a compatible partner from imprinting: the other person resembles your early ideal image, and you resemble theirs. Once introduced, you can talk and decide whether to meet. From there, personal readiness and communication still determine whether a relationship grows.
Unison is built around such an algorithm. You meet people for whom there is a plausible basis for unconscious mutual attraction.
Why did this not become standard sooner? Dating services and their users rarely ask how attraction and filters truly work. We will examine the consequences—and why Unison takes a different approach—in the next articles.