If you go by the preconception that women prioritize relationships while
men are more focused on themselves and their achievements, you’re wrong. In
fact, it’s the other way round – males put love before
career.

A team of international
researchers has carried out a study and found that men are more willing than the
fair sex to sacrifice achievement goals for a romantic relationship, the

ScienceDaily

reports.

According to lead
researcher Sharon Danoff-Burg of the University of Albany, "In our study, women
have been strongly committed to working towards a successful career and
therefore hesitant to abandon their goals for a romantic
relationship.

"In contrast to
women, men appear to derive more emotional support from their opposite-sex
relationships than their same-sex friendships." Before coming to the conclusion,
the team looked at whether personality traits influence students’ life goals,
and focused on the relative importance of romantic relationships and achievement
goals in particular.

A total of
237 undergraduate students (80 men and 157 women aged 16 to 25 years), from the
psychology department at a US state university, completed questionnaires
measuring personality traits and life goals. In particular, the researchers
looked at ‘agency’, or the focus on oneself and the formation of separations,
including self-assertion, self-protection, and self-direction, as well as
‘communion’, or the focus on other people and relationships, which involves
group participation, cooperation and formation of attachments. In general, women
tend to score higher on measures of communion whereas men tend to score higher
than women on measures of
agency.

Life goals included
seven achievement goals – physical fitness, travel, financial success, home
ownership, contribution to society, career and education – and five different
types of relationships – romantic, marriage, children, circle of friends and
family ties. The participants’ willingness to sacrifice achievement goals for a
romantic relationship was also
examined.

Overall both college
men and women showed strong desires for individual achievement and relational
intimacy. Unexpectedly however, men were more likely than women to give priority
to a romantic relationship when asked to choose between a relationship and their
career, education and travelling.

Via Times of India