Romantic Relationships Turn Off Women More Than Men

Marriage and romantic relationships are relentlessly celebrated in the US and other nations. In popular culture, romantic plots are ubiquitous. Characters who love being single and want to stay single – I call them “single at heart” – are rare. In the marketplace, the workplace, and just about every other domain, couples get special deals or better treatment. Singlism is also evident in the hundreds of federal laws in the US that benefit and protect only people who are legally married.

And yet, previous surveys of adults in the US show that substantial numbers of solo single people – they are not married, cohabiting, or in a committed romantic relationship – do not want a romantic relationship. A just published study showed something similar. In “Love as a low priority: Gender and relationship history differences in singles’ value of romantic partnership,” Yale sociologist Hannah Tessler and her colleagues found that 39 percent of singles in the US said that having a long-term committed romantic partner was not at all important. However, they added an important qualification: Having prior romantic relationship experience matters, and the implications are just the opposite for heterosexual men compared to heterosexual women.

The Participants and Their Previous Romantic Relationship Experience

Data were from a nationally representative survey of adults in the US in 2020 and 2021. The researchers focused on the 598 heterosexual adults who, in the second year of the survey, were either single and not dating, or single and dating but did not have a committed romantic partner. Their average age was 50. The participants were asked how important it was to them to have a long-term committed romantic partner; people who said it was not at all important (39 percent) were compared to those who said it was at least somewhat important.

The single participants were sorted into three categories of previous romantic relationship experience:

• No romantic relationship experience at all (28 percent)
• They have romantic relationship experience, but have never been married (32 percent)
• They were previously married (41 percent)

How Previous Romantic Relationship Experience Matters in Opposite Ways for Men and Women

Among the single people who had no previous romantic relationship experience, the men were more likely than the women to say that it was not at all important to have a romantic partner (40 percent compared to just over 30 percent), though the difference was not statistically significant.

For those who did have previous romantic relationship experience, the results were exactly the opposite. Women were more likely than the men to say that having a romantic partner was not at all important.

• Among those who had previous romantic relationship experience, but had never been married, more than 40 percent of the women said that having a romantic partner was not at all important, compared to just over 20 percent of the men who said the same thing.
• Among those who had previously been married, more than half of the women (about 55 percent) said that having a romantic partner was not at all important, compared to just over 30 percent for the men.

Another way to think about the findings is this: For the heterosexual men, if they have romantic relationship experience, they are more likely to want more; for the women, if they have romantic relationship experience, they are less likely to want more. In fact, for the women who were previously married, more than half say that having a romantic partner is not at all important.

The researchers have little to say about why previous romantic relationship experience seems to be a turn off for women but seems to heighten men’s interest in having a romantic partner. They just noted that women did an even more disproportionate share of the work around the house during the pandemic (when the research was conducted) than they had before.

There is other evidence, too, that women are typically less thrilled than men with their romantic relationship experiences. For example, divorce is far more likely to be initiated by women (about 70 percent) than men (about 30 percent). Of people 50 and older who divorce, women are less likely than men to remarry or cohabit.

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As always, the results of studies from the social sciences are based on averages. There are always exceptions. Some women will be even more eager for another romantic partner if they’ve had one in the past, and some men will be less interested.

Having No Romantic Relationship Experience Is Not at All Unusual

Although not the main focus of the study, another finding is worth underscoring: In this representative national sample, 28 percent of the single people have had no romantic relationship experience whatsoever. In my research, Wendy Morris and I found that single people with no romantic relationship experience are judged more harshly than singles that do have some experience. Anecdotally, they also feel more stigmatized. They probably feel like they are the odd person out. And yet, according to this survey, more than 1 in 4 heterosexual single adults in the US also have no romantic relationship experience at all.

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