Study: possessive men have low sperm counts

Cool it with the creeping—for your swimmers’ sake. Guys who snoop through their girlfriend’s stuff tend to have weak semen, finds new Australian research.

In the study, men who scored highest on measures of “mate-guarding” — like secretly reading their partner’s texts, or keeping their girl away from a party if other guys are there — had a lower sperm concentration and lower percentage of motile sperm than men who weren’t as possessive.

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This might be due to an innate, evolutionary mechanism to help men avoid sperm competition, says study author Dr Samantha Leivers.

The logic: if a guy can prevent his partner from having sex with someone else by mate-guarding her, there won’t be any rival sperm in her reproductive tract for his to contend with. So his swimmers wouldn’t necessarily need to be as strong.

Not the jealous type? Even if you don’t ban your girl from hanging out with another guy, you could still be guarding her in other, subtler ways—like buying her jewelry to signal she’s taken, or even complaining about her to other men so she doesn’t seem as desirable, says Leivers. If you find that you do have issues with her, dish them out before your relationship — and your sperm, perhaps — suffers.

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