MEDIA ROOTS- In an ideal world, your partner would not judge you based on the way your last relationship ended. Unfortunately, as a recent study in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology discovered, the real world is a little different.

It is no surprise that neither men nor women find their partners more attractive after discovering that they were on the receiving end of their last break-ups. The flip-side, however, is a different story.

According to the study, titled “Rejection Hurts: The Effect of Being Dumped on Subsequent Mating Efforts,” the average woman actually finds her partner more attractive after discovering that he initiated the split with his last partner.

The subjects of the study rated fictional personal ads for individuals of their genders of choice before and after they learned whether the fictional people had dumped their last partners, had been dumped, or refused to say. According to the results, nobody will like you better if you’ve been dumped, and nobody will like you better if you won’t tell – but women will like you better if you were the one to end your last relationship.

As with any scientific study, this does not apply to everyone; it merely points out a trend. And the trend, in this case, appears to be that you can’t win with men no matter what you do, and you can only win with women by breaking someone’s heart.

Don’t come to any conclusions about what you should do with your current relationship just because of this study; all of the differences in preference were relatively minor. But if you date women, and you expect your current relationship to end soon, you might want to consider doing the dirty work yourself. It may help you in the long run.

Mitchell Singer is an SFSU undergraduate student with a great interest in all types of verbal expression. Aside from newswriting, blogging, and freelance copywriting, he spends his time sampling different media of visual art and reading books on a variety of subjects.

Photo by flickr user oedipusphinx