SEE The 6 Most Common Regrets Men And Women Have After Having Se'x

According to a new study, it suggests men and women have very different pangs of regret after having se’x.

While men wish they were better at picking up women or taking them to bed, women say they regret who they lost their virginity to or moving too fast se’xually, according to results of a UCLA and University of Texas study.

Are you surprised? The researchers say their findings, published Monday in the journal Archives of Se’xual Behaviour, align with evolution, reproduction and the repercussions that could follow se’x.

For men, throughout evolutionary history, every missed opportunity to have se’x with a new partner was potentially a missed reproductive opportunity – a costly loss from an evolutionary perspective,” Dr. Martie Haselton, the study’s co-author and UCLA professor, said.

Meanwhile, women had to worry about the possibility of nine months of pregnancy and caring for a baby.

“The consequences for casual se’x were so much higher for ancestral women…and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to se’xual liaisons even today.”

More than 24,000 people were asked about their se’xual regrets in a series of studies. Respondents were asked to look at hypothetical situations. Then they looked at a list of common regrets and had to tick off which applied to them. Straight, gay, lesbian and bise’xual respondents all took part in the study.

Here were the three most common regrets for men:

- Being too shy to make a move on a prospective se’xual partner (27 per cent)

- Not being more se’xually adventurous when they were young (23 per cent)

- Not being more se’xually adventurous when they were single (19 per cent)

And here were the three most common regrets for women:

- Losing their virginity to the wrong partner (24 per cent)

- Cheating on a present or past partner (23 per cent)

- Moving too fast se’xually (20 per cent)

More women than men even said having se’x with an unattractive partner was their top regret.

Across the board, men and women were having equal amounts of casual se’x, but it was women who felt more remorse over those encounters. This was the same in gay, lesbian and bise’xual hookups – women always felt regret more often and more intensely.

“We do not doubt that social norms, such as a se’xual ‘double standard,’ play a major role in se’xual regret,” lead author Anthony Galperin said in a statement.

The strange thing he noted was that even with birth control in the picture to even out the playing field, feelings about se’x still differed between men and women.