Researchers have recently uncovered an in-depth study that will shed some light on “the evolutionary history of human nature”, and it concludes with proof that women are hard-wired to feel remorse after engaging in casual sex.
The study, published in the current issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, was led by Andrew Galperin, a former social psychology doctoral student at the University of California – Los Angeles, and Martie Haselton, a UCLA social psychology professor. The peer-reviewed study also included University of Texas at Austin’s evolutionary psychologist David Buss.
Findings of the study show how human emotions like regret plays an important role in survival and reproduction. The entire research was divided into three studies – In the first study, 200 respondents evaluated hypothetical scenarios where they’ve regretted pursuing or failing to pursue the opportunity to have sex. They were then asked to rate their remorse on a five-point scale.
In the second study, 395 participants were given a list of common sexual regrets and were asked to indicate which ones they’ve personally experienced. The final study replicated the second one among 24,230 individuals that included gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents.
Here’s a list of results published in Science Daily:
- The top three most common regrets for women are: losing virginity to the wrong partner (24 percent), cheating on a present or past partner (23 percent) and moving too fast sexually (20 percent).
- For men, the top three regrets are: being too shy to make a move on a prospective sexual partner (27 percent), not being more sexually adventurous when young (23 percent) and not being more sexually adventurous during their single days (19 percent).
- More women (17 percent) than men (10 percent) included “having sex with a physically unattractive partner” as a top regret.
- Although rates of actually engaging in casual sex were similar overall among participants (56 percent), women reported more frequent and more intense regrets about it.
- Comparing gay men and lesbian women, and bisexual men and bisexual women, a similar pattern held — women tended to regret casual sexual activity more than men did.
The study also suggests that men are more likely to regret not taking action on a potential partner, and women are more remorseful for engaging in one-time sexual encounters.
Marie Haselton explains the gender difference in sexual regret:
“For men throughout evolutionary history, every missed opportunity to have sex with a new partner is potentially a missed reproduce opportunity — a costly loss from an evolutionary perspective.
But for women, reproduction required much more investment in each offspring, including nine months of pregnancy and potentially two additional years of breastfeeding. The consequences of casual sex were so much higher for women than for men, and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to sexual liaisons even today.”
Haselton adds that fortunately contraception enables women to cut down on the remorse, but it doesn’t seem to erase the sex differences in women’s and men’s responses.
In short, us women are bound to feel guilt and remorse after a casual sex encounter because we’ve somehow “missed” our chance on being able to reproduce.
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