Women regret a one night stand (but men wish they’d had more)
WOMEN have evolved to regret one night stands, scientists claim. In contrast, many men regret not having more flings.
Previous research has found around 50 per cent of people in Western Europe and the US have had at least one one-night stand.
Professor Leif Kennair and colleagues looked at the sexual behaviour of 263 Norwegians aged 19 to 37 – all of whom had at least one one-night stand.
He found around one in three women (35 per cent) but only one in five men (20 per cent) regretted it to some degree.
When it came to how they felt about their most recent casual sex experience, only 30 per cent of women were happy, compared with 50 per cent of the men. As for missed opportunities, 80 per cent of women said they were happy that they turned down sex, compared to 43 per cent of men.
Professor Kennair, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s department of psychology, said ‘very few’ women regretted missing an opportunity for casual sex – compared with 30 per cent of men.
The authors said there were several possible explanations why men were keener on casual sex than women – women worry more about possible pregnancy, catching a sexually transmitted disease, and ‘getting a bad reputation’. They also considered it is possible women report fewer orgasms during casual sex than men.
The researchers said: ‘Men enjoy casual sex considerably more, but this doesn’t explain the gender difference in regret, because gender is the most important influencing factor for both orgasm probability and sexual regret after casual sex.’
They concluded the basis for regret is a throwback to evolution. Co-author Professor David Buss of the University of Texas said: ‘A key limitation on men’s reproductive success, historically, has been sexual access to fertile women. These evolutionary selection pressures have created a male sexual mind attentive to sexual opportunities.
‘As women can seldom have more than ten to 15 children during their lifetime, no matter how much they try, the quality of the children, and thus the quality of the sexual partner who contributes to the children’s genes, is far more important for women than for men.’
Dr Buss added: ‘Female choice – deciding when, where, and with whom to have sex – is perhaps the most fundamental principle of women’s sexual psychology.’
So for a woman, an ideal partner helps raise their children in order to give the next generation the best possible conditions to reproduce.
Despite changes to society th at mean the original biological pressures no longer apply – for instance women are no longer so reliant on men to bring up children – our biology has remained the same.
The authors state it is ‘quite natural’ that women regret casual sex more with a man who is not an ideal partner as for generations, women had much more to lose.
Dr Buss said: ‘Many social scientists expect that in sexually egalitarian cultures such as Norway, these sex differences would disappear. They do not.’