Women with male friends have more sex

For evolutionary reasons.

A new study has found that one way to have more sex is to hang around more people of the opposite sex. Shocking development, we know.

More specifically, the study suggests that the more male friends you have, the more likely it is that your boyfriend will want to sleep with you. Because of a little thing called ‘sperm competition’.

Published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, the study found:

"We secured self-report data from 393 men in a committed, sexual, heterosexual relationship. The results indicate that men whose in-pair partner has more male coworkers and friends (i.e., potential sexual rivals) also perform more frequent in-pair copulations, but only among men who perceive their partner to be particularly attractive relative to assessments of partners by other men in the sample."

Well that complicates things a little, doesn’t it? Not only do you have to find yourself more male friends to make your BF feel threatened (whether it’s knowingly or unknowingly) you’ve also got to be considered attractive by those other men, too.

It’s worth noting that the study was limited by researches not knowing which partner actually initiated sex. So could it be that women with more male friends are just more likely to initiate sex? Yeah, maybe. But the research bods reckon it’s more down to men inherently feeling as though they want to bang their woman when other guys find her attractive.

What a nice sentiment. Way to make us feel special.

"The reason we specifically predicted this is because there's a huge amount of nonhuman literature showing that male animals, for example mice or rats, become very interested in having sex with their partner when they see their partner interacting with other males," the co-author of the study, Todd K. Shackelford, professor and chair of psychology at Oakland University, explained to HuffPost.

"They don't even have to see them having sex with other males. It's just the presence."

Well, thank goodness for that.