He may have stopped going to clubs and bars until 3am, swapped the flatshare in the city for a semi in the suburbs, and ditched the late-night takeaways for nutritious casseroles made in his slow-cooker.
But the sign a man is really ready to settle down? He’ll grow a beard, a study has found.
Researchers recruited more than 400 men aged 18-40 with different levels of facial hair, ranging from clean shaven to full beard.
They then quizzed them about their “social motivations”: the importance of affiliation with friends, status-seeking, caring for family members, finding a new romantic/sexual partner, keeping a partner, and staying safe.
The researchers, from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and the University of Padova, Italy, did this by giving the men brief descriptions of certain “life goals” and asking them to rate on a scale how much they valued them.
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For example, for “mate retention”, they were asked to rate the importance of “staying with a romantic/sexual partner long-term”, and in the area of “kin care” they were asked about how important “spending time with and helping parents, siblings, or other relatives” was.
• Beards present a hairy problem for razor makers
“Regarding fundamental social motives, men having more facial hair reported less mate-seeking motivation, but more mate-retention and kin care motivation,” said the researchers.
That means “bearded men are in it for keeps” said study co-author Professor Peter Jonason, who is based at the University of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski in Warsaw.
“They are less likely to have a fast life history strategy [ie seeking more partners to whom they are less attached] and instead, tend to invest in others both romantically and familially,” he said.
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“Beards, as opposed to say stubble, [are] difficult and time-consuming to grow. Men with full beards may signal their disciplined nature.
“In a way, bearded men are likely to engage in the kind of prosocial ‘alpha’ behaviour that helps women fall in love with them and for other men to trust/fear them.”
In their paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Jonason and his colleagues cited a previous study by the University of Stirling, Scotland, and the University of Queensland, Australia, which found that women who are mothers tend to perceive bearded men as being better fathers.
“Therefore, having more facial hair may be used by men to inform other people that their social motives shift from focusing on [the] mating market to focusing on long-term romantic relationships and family,” Jonason and his colleagues wrote.
Another study, by the University of New South Wales, Australia, published in 2013, also found that men with full beards were perceived as better fathers.
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When it came to attractiveness, however, there were mixed results between men and women: women thought heavy stubble was the hottest, while men thought heavy beards and heavy stubble were the most attractive.
