Study: Guys Like Girls Who Have Been Dumped


Men have always been drawn to a damsel in distress. A recent study may shed new light on why.


Researchers from Penn State University found that guys are more attracted to women who have been broken up with than to those who ended their last relationship.

Interestingly, women want the exact opposite: a man who has initiated the split, not one who has been dumped by his previous girlfriend.

So what is it about a wounded bird that makes many men come running, perhaps in the hopes of rescuing her? And why are girls bewitched by take-charge guys?

"A man taking a dominant role in his romantic relationships may be seen as more consistent with traditional gender roles," offered lead author and Penn State researcher Christine Stanik, according to msnbc.com. "A dominant woman may be less acceptable for this reason, or men may just view her as picky or demanding."

Perceived high standards might be part of the appeal for the women who ranked the breakup initiators more favorably, she added.

"A man's willingness to end an ongoing relationship in hopes of finding someone better might be interpreted by women as a sign of status," Stanik said.

Are we really still that old-fashioned? According to the findings published in Evolutionary Psychology, the answer may be yes.

For the study, Stanik and her colleagues had 198 heterosexual participants go to fake online dating sites and scan the profiles of fictitious people. The subjects -- 102 women and 96 men -- had to rate how interested they were in dating the made-up mates they read about. No photos were provided.

Among the tidbits offered to participants about each prospective partner were basic personality traits, trivial likes and dislikes (a partiality to ice cream, for example) and, ultimately, responses to the statement "My last relationship ended because ..."

The subjects were asked to periodically rank the desirability of the dating site "members" after being presented with new sets of information -- first after seeing the more innocuous details, then again after reading the breakup stories.

Some of the profiled people said they'd ended the relationship; some said they'd been dumped, and some declined to answer the question.

More specifically, the responses were: "My last partner was great, but I thought I could find someone closer to my ideal" (initiator); "I was in love with my last partner, but he/she dumped me" (rejected); or "The person who placed this ad chose not to respond to the question" (non-disclosing).

A turnoff across the board was a secretiveness about why things didn't work out, with a refusal to answer getting bad reviews from both men and women. (Women were more bothered by it than men, however.)
But the results about guys preferring jilted girls and girls preferring heartbreaker guys surprised the authors, who'd theorized that being rejected would be a sticking point for everyone across genders.

"We tested the hypothesis that finding out potential partners were rejected by their last partner would negatively affect participants' desire to pursue a romantic relationship with them," the authors wrote.

They found the gender-split results mysterious.

"These scenarios produced intriguing sex differences, such that men's ratings of women fell after learning she had rejected her last partner, but women's ratings of men increased after the same information was introduced," the researchers wrote.

It may not have been what they said, but how they said it that clinched their ratings, according to University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Christos Ballas.

"It's not the fact that men were dumped that seems to be the turnoff," he told AOL Health. "It's the fact that the man publicly would announce it in this way: 'I was in love with this girl, but she dumped me.' It's terribly pathetic."

Men, he believes, aren't expected to talk that way, which might be why the make-believe ones in the profiles became less attractive to women when they did. When the tables were turned, though, "a guy almost expects a woman to say it in those words."

The reasons men gravitated toward the tossed-aside women are equally simple, according to Ballas.

"It's not that she seems more aggressive, which is the way the scientists make it sound," he said. "It's, 'My chances are better with the girl who doesn't dump guys.'"

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