Not only have you saved a life, but your girlfriend thinks you’re awesome.

The next weekend, still pumped on your mojo, you attempt an expert ski trail and pop a ligament. Not only are you on crutches, but now your girlfriend thinks you’re a bonehead.

Bill Farthing could have told you this would happen.

Farthing, a professor at the University of Maine, just published a study in the journal “Evolutionary Psychology” that sheds light on how women perceive men who take physical risks. His bottom line: Heroism really moves a woman’s meter, but don’t take high risks just for the fun of it.

“Women don’t want either risk-takers or wimps,” Farthing said in an interview Wednesday. “If a woman’s boyfriend or husband gets seriously injured or killed, he’s not going to be useful as a mate.”

Farthing said his work suggests that women prefer men who take mild to moderate risks, but not extreme risks – unless there are altruistic, practical reasons, like saving someone’s life.

One woman who watched her husband attempt a real-life rescue in a flooded river in Lebanon last spring said she was proud of him for his efforts but did not think he took an excessive risk.

Olga Eliason said her husband George takes “calculated risks” and probably thought things through before his futile effort to rescue two people from the Little River in the Patriot’s Day storm.

“I would never recommend for someone to just jump in the water without thinking,” she said. “He’s not a risk taker, and his mind goes at a million miles a minute. I wasn’t surprised one bit at what he did. That’s the man I married, and he did what he had to do.”

Farthing’s conclusions were based on questionnaires completed by undergraduate women at the University of Maine. He had the women read different scenarios involving risk-taking and indicate whether they would be more attracted to a man as a long-term mate or spouse according to how he responded to the risk.

Some of the scenarios included heroic acts, like rescuing a skater who has fallen through the ice or saving someone from a burning building, while others were risky behaviors with no heroic elements, like swimming long distances alone in choppy water or driving at excessive speeds. Farthing had the students choose adjectives to describe the men in the scenarios. The women characterized men who took high risks as more physically fit, athletic and brave than risk- avoiders, but also as more impulsive, attention-seeking and foolish.

Men who took high risks for heroic reasons were viewed as more altruistic, conscientious and sexy than those who took high risks just for the challenge.

Farthing said men are more likely to engage in physical risks than women, and they often do so to draw attention to themselves and their special qualities to reap some benefit. Evolutionary psychologists call this the “costly signaling theory,” he said.

He noted that these behaviors evolved about two million years ago in Africa, when men in hunter-gatherer societies wanted to establish their prowess as hunters and defenders against enemies.

“Those features are still part of our heredity but the world is different now in many ways,” he said.