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Women drive the formation of romantic relationships, according to a new study.

A Oxford University study that analyzed a database of 3 million European mobile phone subscribers reveals that women are more inclined to "invest heavily in creating and maintain a pair-bond" than men.

"It's the first really strong evidence that romantic relationships are driven by women," said an author Robin Dunbar of Oxford.

The study also suggests that women also are more likely to switch "preference ranking" which makes them more focused. They pay attention to individuals in their lives and it varies according to the passage of time, from spouses to children to grandchildren. In men, relationships are more diffuse and men call their spouses more often during the initial seven years of the relationship after which they shift focus to other friends.

The research involved 1.95 billion phone calls and 489 million text messages and was based on the assumption that more number of calls or texts to a person tend to show the closeness of the relationship.

According to the study, pair bonding and investing in relationships is more important to women than it is to men. 

And women tend to shift attention from their spouse to their daughters as they grow older. It is women who shift alliances more often and show greater gender-biases.

"What seems to happen is that women push the 'old man' out to become their second best friend, and he gets called much less often and all her attention is focused on her daughters just at the point at which you are likely to see grandchildren arriving," Dunbar told BBC.

Dunbar believes that the bonds between mother and daughter and the strength of a woman's influence on mating are so strong that they may underlie human society's natural tendencies. "I think the default for humans, if all else is equal, is actually a matrilineal society."

The study appears in the journal Science Reports.