The Secret To A Long-Lasting Marriage?
A younger, smarter wife, one study shows.
The practice of "marrying up" might be looked down upon by some, but when you're talking age, it might be the key to a happy marriage. A recent study showed that the couples who were happiest and had the lowest divorce rate were those where the woman was at least five years younger than her husband -- and when she's better educated. More from Lemondrop: A Rose a Day Keeps the Divorce Lawyer Away
But it doesn't work both ways. The same study claims that when the wife is older by five or more years, the couple is three times more likely to break up than if they're the same age. (We're looking at you, Demi.)
Does this mean that men with younger wives are destined to be happy? Perhaps. Another factor might be that we're getting better at staying together; at least that's what a different poll conducted by The Times of London stated: 54 percent of those polled hadn't even considered having an affair.
What's the key to remaining faithful? Pretty obvious: a decent amount of sex. Of the respondents, 44 percent said they had sex at least once a week and 32 percent are having it two to four times a month. Two percent of the couples, who are obviously a little more limber, are having sex every day. More from Lemondrop: Sex: This Season's Hot New Addiction
But that doesn't mean everyone is remaining faithful. Compare the U.K. research with a 1991 survey from this side of the pond conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The study found 22 percent of married men confessed to being unfaithful, while only 10 percent of married women admitted the same. In 2006, the same survey by the NORC found that 16.7 percent of women admitted to infidelity -- a dramatic increase.
What makes a person cheat on their partner? It's a deeply personal issue, but according to Dr. Lauren Rosewarne, quoted in The Times, "People cheat to feel younger, different or challenged." More from Lemondrop: Cheating: No Longer Just A Man's Sport
Maybe, for those couples facing an age gap -- and possibly an intelligence one, too -- those extra years are enough to make the difference.
Written by Liz Shannon Miller for Lemondrop.
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Discussion
Women who marry men close to their own age, live longer. At least, that's what one Danish study found. Oddly, this never seems to make the headlines.
http://www.yourtango.com/200927620/wives-older-husbands-die-younger
Die young? Get divorced? Which to choose? Luckily other research supports the idea that age differences don't affect divorce rates.
Other research out there contradicts this guy's findings. The other research seems to have looked at more data over a longer time period.
An American study (2008) found that there was no relationship between divorce and age differences in the couple. Rather the age differences for the couples followed different patterns in different years of marriage. When you controlled for that, the rate of divorce for couples with different age differences was the same. If I'm not making sense, the abstract may help:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700520
A british study also found that the likelihood of divorce does not seem to be influenced by age differences. However, for older generations, if there was an age gap over 10 years and individual age over 30, the divorce rate was higher.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/agd0608.pdf
A few questions about the Swiss research:
1. What happens as the age difference between the man and the woman gets bigger? Is there a point where the chance of divorce starts to increase again (say when they are 10 years apart)?
2. What will happen to the couples in the future? The study only looked at the first 5 years.
3. Does it matter that the study looked at couples who were living together as well as married couples? Maybe young women are less likely to live with older men. Couples that live together are more likely to break up.
4. A morbid thought pointed out in some other research - at some point, couples with much older men will have fewer divorces because they have more dead men/widows.
