Study: Married Men With Attractive Wives Are Happier
Men are happier husbands when they have hot wives.
That’s the takeaway from a new study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sounds like science of the obvious, and brings up numerous questions, the most prominent one being how the “attractive” women were rated.
Let’s break down how this study worked.
Researchers “objectively” evaluated the attractiveness of more than 400 newlywed couples. They then asked those couples up to eight times over the next four years how satisfied they were with their marriages.
They found that husbands with “attractive” wives were more satisfied at the beginning of their marriages and remained more satisfied over the following four years. However, women with attractive husbands were no more or less happy over those four years than women with less visually appealing husbands. Women were also less likely to be swayed by attractiveness at all. For men, on the other hand, it played a significant role in their marital satisfaction.
The pretty wives also said they were more satisfied in their marriages and the researchers speculated this could be because having a happy husband made them happy too. That’s partially because husbands with attractive wives are more likely to treat them better than they would less-attractive wives.
That matches with a study from five years ago that found men who felt lucky for marrying hot wives were also more likely to care about their wives’ needs. This in turn made them women happier.
“For women, that’s not part of the deal. The deal that women get isn’t being with an attractive man. It’s being with a protective man, or a wealthy man, or an ambitious man, or even a sensitive man. So they didn’t care as much about the appearance of their husbands,” Benjamin Karney, professor of social psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute at UC Los Angeles and one of the authors of the new study, said of that 2008 study. “They were saying, ‘I’m more attractive than you, but I’m still with you.’ But they didn’t seem to be quite as motivated to help out their wives when they were more attractive than their wives.”
So men are just superficial jerks?