Categories
Culture, Society & Family Researcher news SMU In The News

Daily Mail: Love? Trust? No, a GOOD-LOOKING wife makes for a happy marriage (according to men, at least…)

Andrea Meltzer, SMU, marital satisfactionJournalist Victoria Woollaston reports in London’s Daily Mail about the research of SMU psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, who found in a four-year longitudinal study of 450 newlywed couples that men with physically attractive wives remained much more satisfied in their marriage than men without physically attractive wives.

The article, “Love? Trust? No, a GOOD-LOOKING wife makes for a happy marriage (according to men, at least…),” was published Nov. 20.

Journalist Victoria Woollaston reports in London’s Daily Mail about the research of SMU psychologist Andrea L. Meltzer, who found in a four-year longitudinal study of 450 newlywed couples that men with physically attractive wives remained much more satisfied in their marriage than men without physically attractive wives.

The article, “Love? Trust? No, a GOOD-LOOKING wife makes for a happy marriage (according to men, at least…),” was published Nov. 20.

Meltzer, lead researcher on the study, is an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

Read the article.

EXCERPT:

By Victoria Woollaston
Daily Mail

It appears that for men, the key to a long and happy marriage has less to do with compatible personalities and similar interests and more about how attractive the women they are married to is.

A researcher from Texas has discovered that men with attractive wives have happier marriages and this marital satisfaction remains over time.

Yet the same can’t be said for women. According to the study, the attractiveness of a husband played no part in how happy or satisfied a wife said they were.

Psychologist Andrea Meltzer from the Southern Methodist University Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences polled more than 450 newlywed couples over a four-year period.

This involved four different studies with four different groups of newlyweds.

Before the studies, each couple member was rated for attractiveness by an objective and independent team of researchers.

Over the four years, each husband and wife were separately asked on up to eight occasions to rate how satisfied they were in their respective marriages.

Husbands across all four studies were more satisfied than their wives at the beginning of each marriage.

Over time, husbands with wives that had been rated as attractive remained more satisfied than their spouses.

The attractive wives in these marriages were also, on average, more satisfied and the researchers attributed this to the fact having a happier husband led to a happier marriage overall.

Read the article.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

By Margaret Allen

Senior research writer, SMU Public Affairs