Tags:sex

Men and women both say they want a good sense of humor in their mates. However, men and women mean different things by “humor”. Men want someone to laugh at their jokes, and women want someone who’s funny. The article in Psychology Today has several other insights as well.

There were two points in the article I found particularly interesting:

The allure of male humor is so strong that female laughter may have evolved as a signal of sexual interest—picture a woman’s girlish giggles as she flirts with a man at a bar. Indeed, a German study found that when male and female strangers engaged in natural conversation, the degree to which a woman laughed while talking to a man was indicative of her interest in dating him. How much the woman laughed also predicted the man’s desire to date her. On the flip side, how often a man laughed was unrelated to his interest in a woman….
Funny guys may be attractive, Nilsen says, because they tend to be creative, “outside the box” thinkers. They also have “double vision,” the ability to understand another’s point of view, he says, both traits that are especially alluring to women.

These are excellent observations, and I think it gives insight into the way men and women interpet and signal with laughter differently. However, it made me wonder how same sex couples use humor. Do same sex couples take on complementary roles or the traditional roles of their sex?