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There’s a myth that’s been around since forever that women who have been through puberty and live in close proximity will eventually all start getting their periods at the same time.
Like, even if you start out nowhere close, your start date will change by a day, then another, and so will your sister’s or your mom’s, until one day, boom, all of the magic happens at once.
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Even if it seems like it’s true, or a bunch of people believe it’s true, turns out that it’s just not!
Crazy, right?
New research done at the University of Oxford – by Dr. Alexandra Alvergne and the period-tracking app Clue – analyzed about 1500 people through three consecutive cycles. They questioned participants about whether they believed their cycles were syncing with someone else’s, their relationship with that person, whether or not they live together, and whether or not they’re taking birth control pills.
Out of the 360 pairs of women, only 79 experienced the gap between their cycles beginning to shorten.
“In other words, according to these results, cycles are actually more likely to diverge (get out of sync) over time,” Clue said on its website.
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This is in direct contradiction to an influential study published in Nature in the 1970s which suggested that cycle dates of women who lived and studied together at college did, in fact, sync up.
Since then, there have been studies that cast doubt on the theory, but it still stuck in the minds of the masses as colloquial wisdom.
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Dr. Alvergne spoke to the BBC about her findings, trying to set the record straight.
“As humans, we always like exciting stories. We want to explain what we observe by something that is meaningful. And the idea that what we observe is due to chance or randomness is just not as interesting.”
So, yeah, maybe it’s kind of a downer that you can’t measure your closeness with another woman by when your period starts every month, but think about it this way – if we’re all starting on our own time, then there’s a good chance our cycles are staggered enough to terrify the men in our lives every day of the month.
