Do Handsome men make bad husbands?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-sc...-bad-husbands-i

 

Interesting article, although I'd change handsome to "attractive" and ugly to "unattractive" as we have all seen it's not always about LOOKS that gets the girl.

 

 

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You may have recently heard or seen the news coverage (in the New York Daily News or CBS news online, among others; you may have even seen the lead author, James K. McNulty of the University of Tennessee, discuss it on the Today show) of a study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, that showed that couples in which the woman is physically more attractive than the man are happier than couples in which the man is physically more attractive than the woman. Why is this? Why is it better for the couple if the woman is physically more attractive than the man?

 

If you have been keeping score at home, the findings of this study should have come as no surprise to you. There are two different reasons why couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are more successful and happier than couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman.

 

First, as we elaborate in Chapter 4 of our book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (“Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage? The Evolutionary Psychology of Marriage”), handsome men on average make bad husbands. Men can maximize their reproductive success by pursuing one of two different strategies: Seek a long-term mate, stay with her, and invest in their joint offspring (the “dad” strategy); or seek a large number of short-term mates without investing in any of the resulting offspring (the “cad” strategy).

 

All men may want to pursue the cad strategy; however, their choice of the mating strategy is constrained by female choice. Men do not get to decide with whom to have sex; women do. And women disproportionately seek out handsome men for their short-term mates for their good genes. Even women who are already married benefit from short-term mating with handsome men if they could successfully fool their husbands into investing in the resulting offspring. The women then get the best of both worlds: Their children carry the high-quality genes of their handsome lover and receive the parental investment of their unknowingly cuckolded but resourceful husband. (In order to help the women accomplish this, evolution has designed women to be more likely to have sex with their lovers when they are ovulating and therefore fertile, and have sex with their husbands when they are not.)

 

Thus, handsome men get a disproportionate number of opportunities for short-term mating and are therefore able to engage in the cad strategy. Ugly men have no choice. Since women do not choose them as short-term mates, their only option for achieving any reproductive success is to find one long-term mate and invest heavily in their children -- the dad strategy.

 

Consistent with this logic, studies show that more attractive men have a larger number of extra-pair sex partners (sex partners other than their long-term mates). Interestingly, more attractive men have more short-term mates than long-term mates, whereas more attractive women have more long-term mates than short-term mates. Most importantly for our current purposes, handsome men invest less in their exclusive relationships than ugly men do. They are less honest with and less attentive to their partners. McNulty’s new study of newlyweds confirms this. Their data show that the more physically attractive the husbands are, the less supportive they are of their wives in their interactions.

 

I hasten to add that “good” and “bad” (as in the title of this post “Why handsome men make bad husbands”) are value judgments that scientists do not make. However, empirical data do demonstrate clearly that handsome men have more extra-marital affairs and are not as committed to their marriages, which many wives would undoubtedly consider undesirable. In this sense, handsome men make better lovers than husbands.

 

In my next post, I will discuss the second reason why couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are happier than couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman. If you have been keeping score at home, it will come as no surprise.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-sc...bad-husbands-ii

 

In my last post, I explained why handsome men might make bad husbands. What is interesting about McNulty et al.’s study is that it shows that the absolute levels of physical attractiveness of the husband and the wife are not as important as their relative difference (whether the husband or the wife is more attractive). In fact, in their data, once the relative difference is taken into consideration, the absolute levels make no difference for the couple’s marital satisfaction or their behavior. Their conclusion is that couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are happier than the couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman. Why is this?

 

As we explain extensively in Chapter 3 of our book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (“Barbie -- Manufactured by Mattel, Designed by Evolution: The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Mating”), women’s mate value is primarily a function of their youth and physical attractiveness, whereas men’s mate value is primarily a function of their wealth and status. Men prefer to marry women who are young and beautiful, and women prefer to marry men who are rich and powerful. Of course, you don’t need no stinkin’ evolutionary psychologists to tell you that; your illiterate and uneducated great-grandmother, who never in her life set foot outside of her small village, knew that a hundred years ago. But she didn’t know why; we need evolutionary psychology to figure out why.

 

It is therefore quite natural that a man (whether he himself is handsome or ugly) who is married to an attractive wife is happier than a man who is married to an ugly wife, because it means that his attractive wife has a high mate value. Similarly, since physical attractiveness is not what women seek in their long-term mates (husbands), even though it is what they seek in their short-term mates (lovers), having a handsome husband will not necessarily make a woman happy with her husband or marriage, unless he is rich and powerful as well. Of course, it doesn’t help that her handsome husband is a jerk and is cheating on her (as I explained in my last post).

 

Although I have not seen any other study which examines the effect of relative mate value of the spouses on their marital satisfaction, it is not difficult to propose other hypotheses. For example, following the same logic, couples in which the man makes more money or is more educated than the woman should be more satisfied with their marriage than couples in which the woman makes more money or is more educated than the man. Couples in which the man is taller than the woman should be happier than couples in which the woman is taller than the man (although, according to one estimate, 99.86% of all married couples are of the former type).

 

Similarly, because all primate societies (including all human societies) are gerontocratic (meaning that older males typically have more power and resources than younger males), ceteris paribus, older men have greater mate value than younger men and, as a result, women prefer to mate with older men than with younger men. I would therefore predict that couples in which the man is older than the woman (which of course are a majority of couples in every human society, for this very reason) are happier than (the few) couples in which the woman is older than the man. In addition, the greater the age difference between the man and the woman, the more satisfied the couple should be, not only because it means that the man is older and has higher status, but also because it means that the woman is younger.

Ok, my opinion on this (and I've seen evidence of this in the real world) is that I believe that relationships/marriages work better when the woman likes the man just a little bit more than he likes her. You could say, she's attracted to him more than he's attracted to her utilizing this guy's lingo. She can be totally into a guy that's "less physically attractive" than her...

 

When the balance is slightly in the man's favor, it keeps things at peace and normal. The woman is more feminine in these cases, and this allows the man to be more masculine....this is as nature intended. When you switch these roles around, it's only asking for trouble. IMHO, there is no such thing as an "equal" relationship in the real world....

 

Regardless, I'm sure every guy on here is in support of this theory that wives should be more attractive than husbands!

Interesting article. So you think your man is having an affair?

j/K

Now we know why Topcarbon is so happily married.

Now we know why Topcarbon is so happily married.

yup

Looks don't matter with a man as much. Look at fighters. You can be a completely so-so-looking man, but if you can fight really well, you'll have tons of women after you.

 

You can also be an old guy and still get beautiful women too.

Fellippe...

 

Fellippe...

 

Take that, Janice Dickinson!