Taking the pill will most likely mess with attraction of the opposite sex....

This really does not surprise me....

Study Shows Birth Control Influences Mate Choice

By Stephanie Jacob

Can taking birth control pills influence who you’re attracted to and who is attracted to you? New literature published in the journal "Trends in Ecology and Evolution" suggests just that.

Women who are ovulating are said to prefer more manly men -- those with more masculine facial features, a competitive nature and fewer genetic similarities to their own -- than when they are not ovulating, according to background information in the study.

And men have been found to be more attracted to women during the time of the month when they are ovulating and most fertile.

Women who take the pill, however, don’t experience the mid-cycle change, hormonally, and are more consistently in a state that mimics pregnancy.

“The use of the pill by women, by changing her mate preferences, might induce women to mate with otherwise less-preferred partners, which might have important consequences for mate choice and reproductive outcomes,” Alexandra Alvergne, Ph.D., lead author of the study, told Health.com.

The pill’s influence on reproduction is of particular interest to the study authors. “The ultimate outstanding evolutionary question concerns whether the use of oral contraceptives when making decisions can have long-term consequences on the ability of couples to reproduce,” Virpi Lumma, Ph.D., co-author of the study, said.

Past animal studies have shown that genetically similar mates have a harder time producing offspring, and the offspring they do produce are, in turn, less fertile, according to ABC News.

But other experts downplay the significance of those findings. “In the human world, infertility from genetic similarity has not been found to be true, even though people have suspected it,” William Hurd, M.D., a fertility expert at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center, told ABC News. “Doctors tried for years -- they thought that recurrent miscarriages were related to genetic similarity, but they couldn’t find an example.”

Hurd also points out that the study doesn’t talk about trends in mate selection, but only about preferences.

“Probably the biggest change in my lifetime is how people meet each other: online and using programs that match them for compatibility,” he said. “That’s probably going to have a massive effect on how people end up dating and ultimately reproducing. Just because you like someone with a square jaw in the middle of your cycle probably doesn’t affect who you end up with.”