"“If someone truly regrets not going after the girl or hooking up with a stranger, than perhaps that person might take the proper steps to adjust their behavior moving forward, to avoid any potential future regrets.”"
Gather any group of 30-somethings and inquire about past sexual experiences they regret (namely in their twenty’s), and you will undoubtedly receive a plethora of varied answers — there’s the time with the guy from the club, unintentionally having sex with a girlfriend because you had one too many, having anal sex for the first time without lubrication, waiting too long to tell a boyfriend what you like because you were too embarrassed, or losing your virginity in your cousin's waterbed with a boy you shouldn't have lost your virginity to.
According to recent studies the same doesn't prove true in our male counterparts. While women are more prone to regretting their actions, men revealed that they are most likely to be hung up on their lack of actions. For example, as a female, I would likely wonder to myself “Why did I sleep with THAT guy?” All the while a man would be more prone to kicking himselF in the ass because he DIDN'T sleep THAT woman. After researchers gathered thousands of heterosexuals via college campuses and craigslist in addition to thousands of their homosexual peers through an online banner ad, researchers determined that while both genders reported similar rates of casual sexual encounters, women tended to report more frequent and intense regrets afterwards.
"Prior sex researchers have focused primarily on the emotion of sexual attraction in sexual decisions," coauthor and University of Texas at Austin evolutionary psychologist David Buss said in a statement. "These studies point to the importance of a neglected mating emotion -- sexual regret -- which feels exponentially negative, but in fact can be highly functional in guiding adaptive sexual decisions." Buss and his colleagues seemingly believe regrets aren't necessarily bad. “If someone truly regrets not going after the girl or hooking up with a stranger, than perhaps that person might take the proper steps to adjust their behavior moving forward, to avoid any potential future regrets.” The researchers (who are evolutionary psychologists) also speculate that evolutionary pressures may have assisted in the formation of modern sexual behavior, be it either pleasurable or regrettable.
It may be that women felt regret over certain sexual encounters due to fear of endangerment thousands of years ago, or that women today might merely fear the social pressures of avoiding the taboo label of ‘slut’. Perhaps men regrettably felt the need to sew their wild oats due to the expectation of advancing their genes as opposed to nowadays media and peer pressure suggests that they are not ‘manly’ if they aren't having sex with every penetrable vagina that comes their way.
It’s hard to determine what is factually due to evolution and what has come about resulting from social or cultural differences in human behavior, especially when dealing with a topic as complicated and highly regarded as sex. Unfortunately, the only thing that seems undeniably evident is the fact that as long as long as people are having sex (and not taking and learning from their past experiences), they’ll be having regrets, too.