Girls Lose Friends When They Start Having Sex, While Boys Gain Them

There's plenty of good reasons to actually hold off on "doing the deed" if you're a teenager, and this would be one of them.

When teenage girls start becoming sexually active, their social circles start to shrink--but the opposite happens to boys, according to a newly published five-year study.

Researchers at Penn State University found that girls reported having 45 percent fewer friends after having sex, while boys had 88 percent more friends.

Is this a double standard? Yes it is. Teenage boys are fundamentally terrible human beings, and as a former teenage boy I can vouch for that.

When kids just make out but refrain from going all the way, though, those trends are reversed: Girls gain 25 percent more friends after making out with a partner, while boys lose 29 percent of their social circle.

“We see a really strong double standard when it comes to sex,“ says study researcher Derek Kreager. “[The consequences of sex] are long-lasting, even for people who don’t have sex early.“