Have you ever seen a couple so eerily similar you had to do a double-take? Like they could actually be related? No shade. Just… “huh.”
That, in a nutshell, is a dopplebanger—a portmanteau of “doppelgänger” and the fairly self-explanatory act of banging. As in, someone who hooks up with or dates a person who looks so much like them, it’s hard not to try and figure it out. The term has its roots in queer dating culture, where same-sex couples are statistically more likely to resemble each other simply by virtue of sharing a gender—and, very often, a haircut, a wardrobe, and a general aesthetic. But straight couples aren’t off the hook either. The “Siblings or Dating” meme exists for a reason.
Broad City nailed this one. In Season 2’s “Coat Check,” Ilana meets Adele—played by Alia Shawkat, who looks so much like Ilana Glazer in person that Abbi Jacobson once mistook them for each other—and kisses her before they even exchange names. Then Abbi points out the resemblance, and the whole thing unravels. Ilana has a full Black Swan moment mid-hookup, imagines her own face where Adele’s should be, and ends the coitus immediately. Her reasoning: “I have sex with people different from me.”
What Is a Dopplebanger? The Dating Term for Couples Who Look Weirdly Alike.
Science, for what it’s worth, takes the dopplebanger seriously. Research on assortative mating—the tendency for people to pair with those who share similar traits—suggests couples resemble each other at rates way above random chance. A 2013 study found that when people were shown composite images of their partner’s face blended with their own, they rated those images as most attractive. We are all, on some level, susceptible to a familiar face.
The term gets more loaded when it travels outside queer spaces. Jon Prezant, a certified sex and couples therapist who works primarily with gay men and queer relationships, points out that it has a complicated double life. Inside queer circles, it’s a self-aware joke. Deployed from outside, it curdles fast — a way to package same-sex attraction as narcissism with a punchier name. “Freud actually wrote about his theory of some homosexuality as a mirror of the self,” Prezant told Out. “It’s an old accusation against homosexuality, rebranded by queer people themselves in fact.”
LGBTQ+ psychologist Rod Mitchell has different thoughts regarding the pull toward a familiar face—one that has nothing to do with ego and more so with history. “If you spent years trying to figure out which spaces were safe, someone who looks like you is a shortcut,” Mitchell told Out. “That’s not vanity, that’s someone who learned early on that being understood is not always a guarantee.” In smaller queer communities with overlapping social circles and shared visual codes, the dating pool is already limited. Two people who look alike and go to the same bars on Saturday night aren’t exactly defying statistics.
As for whether any of this spells doom—it doesn’t. Physical resemblance between partners tells you almost nothing about compatibility, and the discomfort people feel when they see it says far more about how we police desire than about the actual couple. Unless someone is actively screening for a mirror image while ignoring every other quality that makes a person interesting, there’s no diagnosis needed. The question to actually sit with is the one Ilana eventually had to face: do you actually like this person, or do you just like what they remind you of?
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