Here’s something for nice guys to cling to: If she doesn’t put out on the first date, you may be husband material.

Or you may be repulsive. But that’s another story.

London’s Daily Telegraph reports that a new study from a British mathematician shows that refusing to have sex with a partner on the first date could be a key to making a successful match.

Generally, those one-night-stands don’t pan out – past one night.

Researchers at University College London used Prof. Robert Seymour’s mathematical model to show that more reliable men were willing to wait longer before having sex for the first time. By contrast, less suitable men (aka dogs, hounds, etc.) were not as likely to continue dating.

“Longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male,” Seymour said, with a resounding DUH! ”By delaying mating, the female is able to reduce the chance that she will mate with a bad male.

“A male’s willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male.

“Long courtship is a price paid for increasing the chance that mating, if it occurs, will be a harmonious match which benefits both sexes. This may help to explain the commonly held belief that a woman is best advised not to sleep with a man on a first date.”

So it took a mathematical model to prove that mom was right all along?

But Dr. Peter Sozou, who helped to construct the model, warned that the strategy was not foolproof.

He said: “The strategic problem the female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play.

“A male is assumed to always want to mate with a female, but a good male is more willing to pay the cost of a long courtship in order to claim the prize of mating.

“The female’s strategy is a compromise – a trade-off between on the one hand the greater risk of mating with a bad male if she mates too quickly, and on the other hand the time cost of delay.

“Under this compromise there remains some risk that she will mate with the wrong type of male.

“She cannot eliminate this risk completely unless she decides never to mate.”

Wow. And people wonder why mathematicians have a hard time getting laid.

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