Negative outcomes in romantic relationships greatly affect girls emotionally and mentally when compared to boys, a study by University of New Mexico shows.
Research conducted on 5,300 high school students found that girls have higher chances of developing depression and suicidal thoughts if their love affairs took an unexpected turn. In order to understand this, the researchers analyzed consequences of mismatches between adolescents' ideal and actual relationships.
For the study, the researchers gave the adolescents a number of cards describing events that often occur within relationships, including everything from hand holding and kissing to sex. The respondents were asked to keep cards that described events they would like to engage in when in a relationship and indicate the order they wanted the events to take place in.
The activity was repeated a year later, but this time the respondents were asked to indicate which events took place in their relationship and in what order.
Researchers interviewed the participants about their mental health during both the interviews.
"I found that girls' risk of severe depression, thoughts of suicide and suicide attempt increase the more their relationships diverge from what they imagined," lead researcher Brian Soller, an assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the US said in a news release.
"Conversely, I found no evidence that bad romantic relationship contributes to poor mental health among boys," Soller added.
He explained that bad outcomes from love affairs affected girls more as relationships happen to be "particularly important components" of their identities, which make them feel either good or bad about themselves. In case the relationship does not work out as expected, it damages their emotional well-being.
Soller said that love affairs are comparatively less important to boys' identities. "Boys may be more likely to build their identities around sports or other extracurricular activities so this could be why they are not affected by relationship inauthenticity," he noted.
The study was published in the 'Journal of Health and Social Behavior.'
