Study: Women more regretful about casual sex

A recent study sheds a little light on how men and women feel the morning after — and beyond.

Men most often regret not having sex with more people, while women frequently regret having sex with the wrong partner, according to a recently released study from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and University of California at Los Angeles. The study aimed to show that the feeling of regret is part of the evolutionary process when it comes to reproduction, researchers from the study reported.

“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,” said Martie Haselton, a UCLA social psychology professor who worked on the study.

The three main regrets for men: being too timid to approach a possible partner, not being more sexu- ally adventurous when young and not being more sexually adventurous in their single days.

The main regrets for women include losing their virginity to the wrong partner, cheating on a present or past partner and moving too fast sexually.

“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 said in a statement.

More women than men included “having sex with a physically unattractive partner” as a top regret.

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 report was based on three studies with a total of about 25,000 people; the findings were published in the November issue of the Archives of Sexual Behav-

ior, an academic journal.