“Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women” is a single answer to a question too broad to admit one. Romantic partnerships serve many functions – affection, emotional support, companionship, social identity, economic pooling, sexual intimacy, reproduction, joint child-rearing, and caregiving. The salience of each function shifts across formation, maintenance, dissolution, and aftermath – and hence, complexity increases further when romantic relationships are framed, in turn, as something pursued, preserved, ended, or mourned. The target article compresses this complexity into one overarching conclusion, attributing four gendered patterns to one main driver: men’s relative scarcity of non-partner intimacy and emotional support. The review’s scope is impressive, but the evidence on which it rests is uneven. Two patterns are robust (men’s greater courtship effort and lower breakup initiation); two are not (men’s larger benefits while partnered and greater losses after separation); and in none does the evidence substantiate an intimacy deficit as the primary driver. In this commentary, I outline these concerns and end with a note on why, despite its overreach, the target article can still advance the field.

Pattern 1 – men’s stronger desire to form relationships – is supported by multiple data sources converging on this conclusion. Where the case weakens is the leap from fact to mechanism. Do men chase relationships harder because securing a partner fills a wider gap in intimacy and emotional support? That bridge rests on small and dated correlational studies in which men lower in support expressed a stronger wish to (re)marry (Frazier et al., Reference Frazier, Arikian, Benson, Losoff and Maurer1996; Carr, Reference Carr2004). Meanwhile, at least three alternative explanations loom. First, mating-market selectivity at younger ages: Women are choosier (Trivers, Reference Trivers and Campbell1972; Fisman et al., Reference Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica and Simonson2006) – especially at the initial encounter – so, the average man faces steeper odds, and his extra effort is a rational response to this asymmetry. Second, male-surplus sex ratios amplify that pressure. In Western populations, the imbalance is modest but widespread in younger age bands; among 30- to 34-year-olds in the United States, the ratio is about 120 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women (Walker et al., Reference Walker, Washington, Anderson and Hayward2023). Third, masculinity norms frame manhood as a status to be earned, in part by “landing” a romantic partner (Vandello & Bosson, Reference Vandello and Bosson2013). Any of these forces could produce the observed courting asymmetry without invoking an intimacy deficit. Whether they operate in concert or one predominates remains an open question.

Pattern 2 – men’s higher returns to involvement – appears compelling at first glance, yet almost all the evidence cited is correlational. If women place more emphasis than men on selecting a partner who is healthy and affluent (Walter et al., Reference Walter, Conroy-Beam, Buss, Asao, Sorokowska, Sorokowski and Zupančič2020), the male benefit seen in correlational studies may simply reflect who gets partnered, not what the partnership does. In studies that model selection, the male benefit shrinks or disappears (DeMaris & Oates, Reference DeMaris and Oates2022; Rapp & Stauder, Reference Rapp and Stauder2020; Kendler et al., Reference Kendler, Lönn, Salvatore, Sundquist and Sundquist2016). A genuine male benefit could still exist, but the present evidence is too selection-prone to say, let alone attribute it to a support-gap mechanism.

Pattern 3 – women’s greater breakup initiation – is firmly established, yet again, the leap to “relationships matter less to women” is tenuous. The pattern pertains only to the moment a relationship snaps. Set against the long slide that typically precedes dissolution, the real question is why women reach the breaking point first. Is their threshold lower because they can draw intimacy and emotional support elsewhere, as the target article implies? Or is their threshold as high as, or higher than, men’s, but reached sooner because women sense the decline earlier and feel it more acutely? Some evidence suggests that women initiate repair efforts more often and are more likely to seek couple counseling (Ogolsky & Bowers, Reference Ogolsky and Bowers2013; Whitton et al., Reference Whitton, Weitbrecht, Kuryluk and Bruner2018). As problems accumulate, the very benefits cited by the support-gap model – affection, acceptance, daily encouragement – may be where the decline is felt first, and most sharply, by women. Hence, when they end a union, they may not abandon intact support to replace it elsewhere but react to its erosion despite repeated repair attempts. In short, women’s higher breakup rates may simply tell us who reaches “enough is enough” first, not whose enduring need for the intimacy benefits provided by a partnership is smaller.

Pattern 4 – men’s greater suffering after dissolution – rests on a selective reading of the evidence. Several studies, including my own cited, do report steeper initial drops for men in life satisfaction, mental health, and loneliness – stronger reactions that may mirror the fact that women initiate more breakups. Yet these gaps close quickly. The one gender gap that endures points the other way: women incur far larger economic losses. Thus, with a slightly broader lens – tracking outcomes beyond the psychological domain and extending past the first year – we could just as easily headline the evidence: “women suffer more.” One drag on women’s financial recovery is that re-partnering – the fastest rebound route (Leopold & Kalmijn, Reference Leopold and Kalmijn2024) – is less prevalent for women than for men. The target article treats this as further proof of a deeper male intimacy deficit. Likewise, men’s warmer memories of their ex-partners are folded into “longing for lost support” rather than simple closure. With evidence framed so flexibly, almost any narrative – including the title claim – can be made to fit, while countervailing patterns and explanations, such as women’s enduring economic losses and declining partner-market leverage with age (Skopek, Reference Skopek and Skopek2023), are set aside.

Taken together with the authors’ own, commendable “contradictory-evidence” section, these concerns further undermine their case. The title claim is still not without merit. It may hold in certain phases, for specific outcomes, and in some of those instances, the support-gap mechanism could be the primary driver. Yet any sweeping verdict oversimplifies the real-world complexity of romantic relationships – multiple stages, diverse outcomes, and many intertwined mechanisms. Still, bold claims can serve the field: like the once-influential infidelity thesis (Buss et al., Reference Buss, Larsen, Westen and Semmelroth1992), they can spark debate, sharpen theory, and improve methods – even when they do not survive. That, I believe, is the target article’s most valuable contribution.