Women hard-wired to regret casual flings

Women are genetically hard-wired to regret casual flings with a wrong partner - because of the burden of having children, while men regret not having them, a new study has found.
According to new research by psychologists at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Texas at Austin, men are more likely to regret not seizing the opportunity for a quick and meaningless tryst, while women are more remorseful about having a fling.
Evolutionary pressures probably explain the stark contrast in remorse between men and women when it comes to casual sex, researchers said.
"For men, throughout evolutionary history, every missed opportunity to have sex with a new partner was potentially a missed reproductive opportunity - a costly loss from an evolutionary perspective," said Martie Haselton, professor of psychology and communication studies.

"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 ancestral women than for ancestral men, and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to sexual liaisons even today," said Haselton.

"These findings are consistent with the notion that the psychology of sexual regret was shaped by recurrent sex differences in selection pressures operating over deep time," said co-author David Buss, a University of Texas at Austin evolutionary psychologist.
In a study of more than 24,000 participants, the three most common regrets for women, in descending order, were: losing their virginity to the wrong partner (24 per cent), cheating on a present or past partner (23 per cent) and moving too fast sexually (20 per cent).

For men, the top three regrets were, in descending order: being too shy to make a move on a prospective sexual partner (27 per cent), not being more sexually adventurous when young (23 per cent) and not being more sexually adventurous during their single days (19 per cent).
The study appears in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour.