Research: Wife should be smarter & younger than you

The Swiss study, romantically entitled Optimizing the marriage market: An application of the linear assignment model, offers solutions to life's biggest problem. The abstract begins by taking all thoughts of love and passion and tossing them down the chasm of objectivity: "Research shows that the success of marriages and other intimate partnerships depends on objective attributes such as differences in age, cultural background, and educational level."

The highlights are, indeed, a joy to behold, squeeze tightly, and never, ever let go. The perfect wife is five years younger than her husband. She is from the same cultural background. And, please stare at this very carefully: she is at least 27 percent smarter than her husband. Yes, 35 percent smarter seems to be tolerable. But 12 percent smarter seems unacceptable. In an ideal world--which is the goal of every scientist--your wife should have a college degree, and you should not. At least that's what these scientists believe.

I know your bit will already be chomped with your enthusiasm for learning these learned scientists' methodology. Well, they interviewed 1,074 married and cohabiting couples. And they declared, "To produce our optimization model, we use the assumption of a central 'agency' that would coordinate the matching of couples." Indeed.

This optimization led research leader Nguyen Vi Cao to speak with some certainty to the Telegraph: "If people follow these guidelines in choosing their partners, they can increase their chances of a happy, long marriage by up to 20 percent."

Up to? Couldn't they be a little more exact? That 27 percent thing seemed pretty exact.
Still, let me tell you about one of these guidelines: marrying a divorcee makes it far more unlikely that you will be happy. I know, I know. It doesn't seem fair, does it? But science has spoken. And when science speaks, you bow your head until your nose tickles the frigid floor tiles.

Freakonomics: Economic Model of the rise in Premarital Sex

Interesting working paper called “From Shame to Game in One Hundred Years: An Economic Model of the Rise in Premarital Sex and its De-Stigmatization” by Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Jeremy Greenwood, and Nezih Guner.

Summary: Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less than others about the perils of premarital sex, because the latter will lose less from an out-of-wedlock birth. Modern contraceptives have profoundly affected the calculus for instilling sexual mores, leading to a de-stigmatization of sex. As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture.

There is something worth unpacking in just about every sentence there. Also worth reading is the authors’ take, empirical and otherwise, on the sexual revolution:
In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this. Public acceptance of this practice reacted with delay. Only 15% of women in 1968 had a permissive attitude toward premarital sex. At the time, though, about 40% of 19-year-old females had experienced it. The number with a permissive attitude had jumped to 45% by 1983, a time when 73% of 19-year-olds were sexually experienced. Thus, societal attitudes lagged practice. Beyond the evolution and acceptance of sexual behavior over time, there are relevant cross-sectional differences across females. In the U.S., the odds of a girl having premarital sex decline with [Ed.: increased] family income. So, for instance, in the bottom decile, 70% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced it, versus 47% in the top one. Similarly, 68% of adolescent girls whose family income lies in the upper quartile would feel “very upset” if they got pregnant, versus 46% of those whose family income is in the lower quartile.

In SuperFreakonomics, we relate a parallel statistic concerning men and the sexual revolution:
At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute. Now imagine that same young man twenty years later. The shift in sexual mores has given him a much greater supply of unpaid sex. In his generation, only 5 percent of men lose their virginity to a prostitute.

I guess India in future, will show similar stats..

Marriage vs Ph.D

Research: Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men!

Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups. The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.
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Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.
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Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.
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Men who are more attractive than their partners would theoretically have access to partners who are more attractive than their current spouses, McNulty said. The "grass could be greener" mentality could make these men less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marriage. Physical attractiveness of husbands is not as important to women, the researchers suggest. Rather, wives are looking for supportive husbands, they say. So it seems the mismatch in looks is actually a perfect match. "Equitable is unlikely to mean the same on every dimension," Ariely said during a telephone interview. "It just means that overall two people make sense together."

Full Article @ LiveScience

Research: Google tells what men and women want

Given that Mark Zuckerberg has explained to you that privacy is no longer a social norm, your first thought this morning was probably, "How can I get more of my information to be public on Facebook?"

Your second might well have been something to do with improving your current relationship with your beloved.

In a heartwarming analysis of Google searches, Dan Ariely, author of the beautifully named "Predictably Irrational," revealed just how different boyfriends and girlfriends are, when it comes to asking the Google oracle for ways to solve their relationship problems.

Taking the search "How can I get my boyfriend/girlfriend to..." structure, Ariely showed that girls most want to know how to get their boyfriends to propose. Truly, this is one of the most treacherous areas in human life, and I have many deep and forceful opinions on the subject.

Girlfriends are also very keen to know how to get their boyfriends to spend more time with them, love them, and generally be more romantic and less stinky.

Boyfriends, on the other hand, are most concerned to discover how to get their girlfriends to perform oral sex. This revealing bucket of angst is closely followed by the need to get their girlfriends to sleep with them, lose weight, and trust them. Shaving and forgiveness also make an appearance.

While Ariely's discoveries are, well, predictably rational, I decided to take things a step further and discover how these relationships change, once the girlfriend has learned how to get the boyfriend to propose. So I went for the "How can I get my wife/husband to..." paradigm. The last time I enjoyed this much simultaneous fun and tragedy was when I read a Russian novel in a Croatian bar.

You will be moved to tears, or perhaps St. Petersburg, when I tell you that husbands' most frantic search is, "How can I get my wife to love me again."

Before you reach for your handkerchief to dry your eyes, might I tell you that the next most popular googling suggestion is, "How can I get my wife to swing."

You will feel that your world has been temporarily righted when I tell you that the next two pleas involve losing weight and shaving. However, the list is completed with wanting to know how to get your wife to trust you again, love you and, that perennial source of friction, shut up.

What of the wives? Once they are betrothed, do they come to terms with their man's foibles and failings?

Well, the prime Google search for "How can I get my husband to..." is followed by the words "fall in love with me again." Yes, husbands and wives apparently want to be loved by their partners but have no idea how to achieve it.

This plea is followed by wanting their husbands to be "more affectionate" and "to love me again." Forget the "falling in love" part; just give me the basic love thing, these searchers seem to say--the one that involves a little thought and kindness.

Soon, though, the googling warts are exposed. For the next most popular is the need to know how to get the husband to help around the house. This is followed by more intimate needs, like romance and conversation. However, it is rounded out by a need to get husbands to leave the house and stop drinking.

What does this analysis tell us about the state of human relations? Well, there is little hope, isn't there?

Perhaps the planets Mars and Venus will, one day, be the homes of unisexual communities. Once men and women have finally stopped searching for answers even Google can't give them, that is.

Research: Using Math to choose a wife

Perhaps the subject most fascinating to me at the moment is the gamble that is involved in choosing a life partner.
Perhaps I have been unnecessarily haunted since research revealed that Facebook destroys romantic relationships. Still, it was quite odd that a man whom I have chosen to follow on Twitter for his remarkable erudition in social psychology (oh, alright, his name is Dominic Johnson) passed along a quite extraordinary article from New Scientist, one that has made me ponder more deeply than I usually care to.

While the article begins by discussing the mathematical ways in which you can improve your chances in Vegas (or, if your taste and eyes have deserted you, Atlantic City), it goes on to discuss the marriage problem. Apparently, mathematicians have tortured themselves over marriage for some years. I did not know this. I figured that perhaps mathematicians only ever had one girlfriend, whom they married very soon after sex.

May I go down on one knee and admit how wrong I was?
Mathematicians have racked their brains and abacuses, for the good of society, in order to help us all choose wisely the person who shares our king-size. According to New Scientist, the law of diminishing returns has long been thought to be a marvelous indicator of when to stick, rather than turn another card.
Naturally, scientific laws have certain suppositions. And at first glance, I considered the idea of having a mere 100 choices a little unrealistic.

However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a little more natural than it might have appeared. We march our way merrily through life, meeting people and declaring them a "yay" or a "nay."

Oh, we have some supposed criteria in our heads about what makes a "yay"- body type, nose shape, or some such nonsense. But commitment is a very hairy creature, one that barks at us more often than it sings.
So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don't choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)

The "Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best" method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.

However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.
Here's the real beauty of this calculation, though. You don't have to limit yourself to 100. This optimization works for any population. So if you have a world of 26 potential life partners, simply divide by 2.72 and choose the next best one.
Now, I know it is sometimes hard to know exactly how many potential partners are in your firmament. But it is surely not beyond some calculation.

We need a little more stability in this world. We need more happiness. And we need just a little more good judgment. It seems that only math can save us.

There is a small word of warning, however. Some psychologists, such as JoNell Strough at West Virginia University, believe that the more we invest (in a gambling and, one supposes, marriage context), the more likely our decision will be attached to disaster.

However, I would be interested whether any of you number-conscious geniuses out there have also used mathematical principles to choose your betrothed. Perhaps you have done it more than once, but we would still love to hear your number-based criteria.

Source: Cnet

Research: Living together Doesn’t make Marriage Last

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”

The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.

Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.

“The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women,” said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.

Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.

“Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults,” the study said. “As a result of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, the number of children born to unmarried cohabiting parents has also increased.”

By the beginning of the last decade, a majority of births to unmarried women were to mothers who were living with the child’s father. Just two decades earlier, only a third of those births were to cohabiting couples.

The study found that, over all, 62 percent of women ages 25 to 44 were married and 8 percent were cohabiting. Among men, the comparable figures were 59 percent and 10 percent.

In general, one in five marriages will dissolve within five years. One in three will last less than 10 years. Those figures varied by race, ethnicity and sex. The likelihood of black men and women remaining married for 10 years or more was 50 percent. The probability for Hispanic men was the highest, 75 percent. Among women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last less than 20 years.

The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.

Women who were not living with both of their biological or adoptive parents at 14 were less likely to be married and more likely to be cohabiting than those who grew up with both parents.

The share who had ever married varied markedly by race and ethnicity: 63 percent of white women, 39 percent of black women and 58 percent of Hispanic women. Among men in that age group, the differences were less striking. Fifty-three percent of white men, 42 percent of black men and 50 percent of Hispanic men were married or had been previously married at the time of the survey.

By their early 40s, most white and Hispanic men and women were married, but only 44 percent of black women were.

Source: Nytimes.com