Clarissa Brincat in Scientific American:
Do you think women are more invested in romance than men? Rom-coms and women’s magazines may push this stereotype, but psychological research is increasingly telling a different story: multiple studies have suggested that men may actually place a greater importance on romantic relationships. Now researchers have identified a key behavioral factor that explains this surprising difference.
Drawing on more than 50 studies of mixed-gender relationships, researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Minnesota and Vrije University Amsterdam proposed that men, compared with women, expect to gain more from being in a romantic relationship and are thus more motivated to find a partner. According to multiple anonymous surveys, men also tend to experience greater mental and physical health benefits from being in a relationship, are less likely to initiate breakups and struggle more with the emotional toll of a breakup, the researchers wrote in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Elaine Hoan, who studies social psychology at the University of Toronto, says these observations align with a trend she has seen in her own research: “that single men are typically less happy with their singlehood than single women, even across different Western and Eastern cultural contexts.”
More here.
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