“I think your response to No Figuring Women this week was dead on,” writes Slog tipper Jim. “But some recent research by Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater may suggest something else is at play.”

A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton…. They asked 184 heterosexual students at the university to participate in a study on sexual attraction and told the volunteers that a computer program would match them with an ideal partner. Half the participants were single and half attached, with equal numbers of men and women in each group. Unknown to the participants, everyone was offered a fictitious candidate partner who had been tailored to match their interests exactly. The photograph of “Mr Right” was the same for all women participants, as was that of the ideal women presented to the men. Half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was already in a romantic relationship.

“Everything was the same across all participants, except whether their ideal mate was already attached or not,” says Burkley.

The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

The researcher theorizes that women are more attracted to attached guys because their current girlfriends—the fact that they have girlfriends at all—essentially “vouches for” the guy. He’s relationship material. The fact that he’s in a relationship proves it and women want guys who are relationship material… even if they have to destroy a guy’s current relationship to get him.

Women are eeeeeeeevil.

64 replies on “All The Best Men Are Taken”

  2. Given your stated track record of squeezing out the young ‘uns out-of-wedlock LC, I guess you’d be the expert on “looking in the wrong places” now, wouldn’t you?

  6. Look: whenever a woman sees another woman with something, she’ll always go: ‘Oooh, I want that, too’ and ‘I wonder how that will fit me’. It’s not because she really wants or needs it; it’s a matter of ‘I gotta have whatever everybody else has’. It’s competition (women are WAY MORE competitive than men) and external validation of self-worth (sorry, girlfriends: deep down you are shallow). That goes for a pair of jeans, an eclair, a puppy, a man, or a career. It just boils down to ‘I bet I can wear it better than her’.

    Men, on the other hand, tend to see things as objects and possessions. Furthermore, they think once they have something, they own it forever. If a woman is taken, well–unless you really, really, really, really, really, really want it–let’s put it this way: would you just go and rob somebody? (Of course, I’m not saying this doesn’t happen–testosterone doesn’t just make Arab American men wear strong musky cologne.)

    And there you have it.

  7. @34: Interesting idea. I agree with you too, though it doesn’t apply to this study, since none of the women interacted with “Mr. Right” but only saw a photo of him.

    @9: Spot on. It’s idiot logic. Of course, being married doesn’t mean you’re a good mate either — it might mean you were both terrified of being alone, somebody got knocked up, etc. People get married for all kinds of reasons, and not always the right ones. People marry bitches and assholes all the time too, because they’re morons.

  8. Oh fer crying out loud, it’s called Mate Poaching, and you can see it across all species of creatures. There’s a lot of research in the field on birds, especially.

    Not evil. Hard-wired to confer evolutionary advantage.

  9. I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind the “oh, of course college-aged women want to bust up relationships” sentiment, but I think that the sample set does have another significance. Being “attached” probably doesn’t carry the same meaning for a person in their late teens/early 20s that it might for someone older. That is to say, a college-aged girl likely doesn’t read “attached” as married for 10 years with 2 kids.

  10. 1. A lot of you haters don’t seem to understand experimental social science. I haven’t read the study, b/c it’s behind a wall, but usually subjects are randomly assigned to a control or experimental group. The point is: with two identical groups of women (b/c they are randomly selected to be in one group or another) by only changing the relationship status you increase the percent of women who would pursue a relationship with the target by 30 percentage points! Or, another way, about 50% more women were interested in pursuing a relationship. With that sample size that’s pretty significant.

    2. There are always generalization problems. Most of the criticism in the comments are that they are young women, suggesting that for older women the effect would be smaller. Maybe, it would be interesting to see. Is there any reason why we might think that the effect would be smaller for older women? @60, that is a good point.

    3. I’m a straight guy, 25, never been in a LTR or really dated. Does that mean I’m automatically not dateable?

  13. In my mind there are four major things going on here from the women’s perspectives, when this does happen. One is the thrill of the forbidden — and the fact that it must be kept closeted (unlike, say, an interracial or same-sex relationship… it’s not ‘nice’ to the other person to keep those secret). Two is that there’s a certain very masculine stereotype of the husband/inseminator/father/provider role, and this is a turn-on for many women. Three is that, well, women are commitment-phobes too. Flirting with a guy who is taken (or gay, which happens a lot in fag-hag relationships) is a way to be sexy without that fear of socially “having” to date them and settle down. Four, there’s a (silly) presumption that the married guy is faithful and that he’s probably been ‘abandoned’ by his wife. Essentially, he’s now owned by the new secret and forbidden girlfriend who has the power to throw him back any time she is finished playing with him. And if she decides instead that she wants him, well, he’s relationship material and he must really really love her, right? Not sure how the sadistic girlfriend-dominating-wife aspect of it plays into things for most women, but I’m sure it plays a part for some as well. Why expect women to be different than men in that respect?

    In short, this is the perfect confluence of romance-novel/soap-opera drama and human nature. It’s the ‘love that can never be,’ the holy grail of female pulp-fiction romances.

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