Ask the question in the title in Sweden, Italy, England, Australia or southern China and you get a different slice of the answer, because the research teams in each place tested a different part of it. The shared idea is called mate-choice copying. In some animal species, a female becomes more likely to choose a male once other females have chosen him. Whether people do something similar is what the six studies below look at, each from a different side. This is a tour by place, not a ranking.
Göteborg, Sweden: a live test of the ring
Two zoologists at Göteborg University tested the wedding ring effect, the idea that women would prefer men who are already engaged or married. Rather than photographs, they used a series of live interactions between men and women. Women did not find men signalling engagement, or being perceived as having a partner, more attractive or higher in socioeconomic status, and signs of engagement did not change the women's reported willingness to have a short-term or long-term relationship with them (Uller and Johansson, 2003).
Among the six studies here, this is the only one that put the title's idea to the test in person. The result was no.
Padua, Italy: which women, and when
At the University of Padua, 208 women rated the attractiveness of men described as either single or attached. Partnered women favoured attached men at the low-fertility phases of the menstrual cycle, but preferred single men, if masculine, when conception risk was high (Bressan and Stranieri, 2008).
The preference for attached men in that abstract is reported for women who already had partners. It says nothing about single women preferring them.
Liverpool, England: what the woman beside him looks like
Researchers at the University of Liverpool showed female raters video recordings of "model females", the women presented as a man's past or present partners, to see whether personality and behaviour mattered as well as looks. The model woman's attractiveness came out as the primary cue. They also found no evidence that raters preferred the partners of slightly older model women, contrary to some earlier findings (Vakirtzis and Roberts, 2012).
Townsville, Australia, and Monash University: history and identity
At James Cook University in Townsville, 123 female university students rated photographed men shown alone or with one, two or five women represented by silhouettes, and the men were described to match. Men pictured with one or two previous partners were generally rated more desirable than men with none. Men with five previous partners were rated less desirable. Younger, presumably less experienced women copied more than older women, while a woman's high self-perceived mate value did not predict more copying (Anderson and Surbey, 2014).
A later online survey at Monash University had 831 participants. They rated photographs alone, then rated them again after being told about the pictured person's relationship status and relationship history. Both gender identity and sexual orientation influenced how much people copied, and desirability patterns differed a great deal across those groups. The authors concluded that mate copying is extremely nuanced and sensitive (Jarrett and Anderson, 2022).
Guangzhou, China: when she knows more about him
Two experiments at Sun Yat-Sen University looked at what happens when women have more than a photograph. With photos alone, women showed mate-choice copying. Once they were given information about a potential mate's personality traits or financial situation, negative or positive, the copying disappeared. That effect appeared only for low-attractiveness men and for long-term partners (Liu and colleagues, 2021).
Putting the places side by side
None of the six studies asked why single women date married men, and none measured motives. The Swedish live test found no gain for a man who looked engaged or partnered. In Padua, the pull of attached men was found among partnered women and changed with cycle phase. In the other four, copying varied with how attractive the model woman was, how many partners the man had had, the rater's age, the rater's gender identity and sexual orientation, and whether the rater had personality or financial information about a less attractive man being judged as a long-term partner. None of these studies showed single women favouring a man simply because he was married.
Meanwhile, the date this site is named for
Sayer, also traded as Stamaran, comes from Khuzestan in Iran. It is amber-brown and semi-dry. It is not the same as Shahani, which is a separate variety. Malaysia has no commercial date-growing trade, so every date sold here, Sayer included, is imported.
Earlier versions of this page linked to Kurma Bam Shah Alam, and that link stays. More about this site is on the about page and the contact page, and other posts are on the blog.