Men Can’t Help The Wandering Eye [Study]

A new, incredibly convenient study shows that men really can’t help their wandering eyes, but it’s not for the reasons you think.

If you’re a girlfriend or wife who hates it when your man checks out other women, you might have to cut him some slack in light of a new study. It really is in a man’s genes to look at other women, and it’s not really something that can be helped outside of sheer force of will.

The reason, according to researchers at the University of Stirling and the University of Glasgow, is that while women are more drawn to (and attracted to) faces that are familiar, men go the other way and are drawn to faces they’ve never seen before.

For the study, researchers showed a group of men a series of photos of different women, while women were shown images of different men. It turns out that men were less and less attracted to a female the more frequently they saw a photo.

Conversely, the more women in the group saw the same man, the more attracted to him they became.

The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, also controversially posits that it is an evolutionary mandate for a man to mate with as many female sex partners as possible.

Per the research:

“Men found female faces they had already seen as less attractive and less sexy, especially for short-term relationships.

“There is a tendency for males to pursue a large number of partners as they can dramatically increase their reproductive success by mating with multiple females.”

So this study may finally explain why many men have the “wandering eye” problem, but just between us girls, you can probably still give your man a hard time for it.

[Image via: Creatista / Shutterstock]