By Emily Murray

It’s not often we can blame our judgement calls on medication, but listen up ladies – according to a new study, you may have chosen a “boring man” because of…get this…your  birth control. You may be thinking “what!?” well so are we, so here are the basics of the study that makes this seemingly wild claim.

The Study
In order to see how making changes to a woman’s hormones actually effects her choice in a mate Scottish and Czech researchers  asked 2,500 women with at least 1 biological child about the relationship they have/had with the fathers of their children. In addition, they were asked to report what type of birth control they used when they initially met. In order to make sure that the researchers received fairly accurate answers, the women were told that this was a study to see essentially what their experience with the relationship, the pregnancy and having a child were like.

The Result
The findings were published this week in the online edition of the Royal Society B. Essentially those who were taking oral contraceptive pills when they met their mate were actually more apt to stay in a relationship than those who were not taking the pill. What seems odd here is that while the relationships reported by the woman not on the pill were intense in the physical regard, they didn’t hold up the same even though the men these women choose were “more handsome and better in the sack,” as reported in an MSN.com article.

It comes as no surprise that hormones, or sudden changes in them, lead to different behavior but this newest study raises new questions as to how they effect are ability to find a mate.

So what are we supposed to take away from this? Well it has been tested before how women see men at different points in their monthly cycles. Typically when ovulation is about to occur, women subconsiously find themselves more attracted to men with very masculine features and they even are more apt to wear tight fitting clothing around this time. All these changes can be traced back to our inherent need to reproduce as part of our primal selves. It appears though in doing this, women tend to be more attracted to the physical features of a man than his actual personality. By comparison, the women on the pill appeared to be attracted to me based on their interests and personalities rather than physical appearance and these relationships were able to go the distance more frequently.

Another odd difference is that by nature women normally sense the pheromones of men who are genetically opposite to themselves in order to subconsciously produce the best offspring. Women on birth control are actually more attracted to men with a scent that reveals they are more closely genetically similar.

Weird right??
What do you think about these findings?