Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080410/sc_livescience/whybeautifulwomenmarrylessattractivemen;_ylt=Ai6I3iUl8T7NM4lI499n0h8DW7oF

by pius • 18 years ago

15 21 18 years ago

news.yahoo.com

lacker• 18 years ago

This title is misleading. In fact the text of the article contradicts the title:

"About a third of the couples had a more attractive wife, a third a more attractive husband and the remaining partners showed matching looks."

Regardless, the article is stretching pretty far to make its conclusions. The study just showed couples where the woman is more attractive than the man were happier. That doesn't mean women should "marry down". It could just mean that men care more about looks, and therefore an attractive woman contributed more to the couple's happiness than an attractive man.

yters• 18 years ago

If that were the case, then the happiness of the couple would be independent of the attractiveness of the man, or at least have little correlation.

Anyways, it's probably because the match hits an equilibrium. Men are statistically much more likely to commit adultery than women (22%:14%).

http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id...

A difference in attractiveness in the woman's favor means there is much less incentive for the man to cheat, since a woman more attractive than his wife is unlikely to try and seduce him. Consequently, it isn't worth the risk for the man.

TammyK• 18 years ago

"with the perfect 10 representing the ultimate babe."

Sounds real credible.

attack2• 18 years ago

There is probably a strong inverse correlation between working hard for success and attractiveness in men. That could be reversing the results.

Women don't prefer less attractive men, all else being equal.

pius• 18 years ago

There is probably a strong inverse correlation between working hard for success and attractiveness in men.

Why?

attack2• 18 years ago

Instead of getting into a numbers match between all the influencing factors, I'd rather just point out that there are many confounding factors and that the authors of this seemed to miss that point entirely.

osipov2• 18 years ago

Simple answer: money

it is interesting that article mentions height and money because while back i read another study that figured out how much money a man should make to compensate for a situation where the man is shorter than the woman. apparently there was an almost a linear correlation, for every inch of extra height that a woman has on a man, the man must have at least an extra 6 million of net worth.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

Damn. 6 million dollars per inch.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

That's per inch of height. Just in case anyone was wondering.

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

Money isn't everything. Silicon Valley is filled with thousands of ugly rich dudes who can't find a date.

ardit33• 18 years ago

I'd say that SV is a sausage fest, but if these guys are rich, and mobile, than what prevents them to move to a place where they would have much better ods at finding good looking and smart women? If you have money, NYC is a blast. Maybe they can work a pet project from there.

I'd say, if you have more than 3-4 millions on your bank account, you are really well off, and the only thing that prevents from finding a woman, is your character, or lack of trying.

Bad looks, can be fixed with some good fashion, exercise, and maybe some litle surgery.

osipov2• 18 years ago

>Silicon Valley is filled with thousands of ugly rich dudes who can't find a date.

i suspect it is relative -- SV is also filled with thousands of average looking, rich dudes get enough dates -- the point is the pool of rich people in SV is larger than in many other places in the country, hence there is a larger barrier to entry.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

There's an age limit to that, though. This doesn't work with girls in their early 20s.

Edit: This also doesn't work on interesting girls - the kind that you will still like spending time with when their looks have declined.

richcollins2• 18 years ago

I don't agree. Money is just a sign of a characteristic that is more important to women, leadership.

You have to realize that the attraction women feel for men evolved in a much different environment from our current world. Women are often attracted to men that are leaders and show the signs of someone who will be good at controlling his environment and providing a stable, safe situation for the raising of children.

weezus3• 18 years ago

Actually money is very important because, like height, it is a heritable trait. It's like a legally designated addition to the DNA molecule.

Pop out a kid with a rich guy and you've got swanky child support and the kid gets a trust fund.

zandorg• 18 years ago

A very tall young woman had her photo taken with me in a nightclub, with requisite big grin. I'd assume that's 16 inches or $96 million dollars, money I don't have! I think she was picking up the wrong vibes from a screenwriter cum software developer.

weezus3• 18 years ago

Women can fall in love with guys that aren't hot. Guys don't fall in love with women who aren't hot to them. Love, yes; in love, no.

vitaminj• 18 years ago

These kinds of studies are ridiculous.

First there's the element of subjectivity and discretion in the "trained coders" that rate a person's attractiveness. On a single overall number scale no less.

But more importantly, how do they even hope to attain any semblance of ceteris paribus ("all things being equal") in this study? Of the millions of factors that contribute to pair selection and how couples interact, the researchers want to isolate disparities in attractiveness and test whether this is significant. Short of cloning a whole bunch of people and pairing them up with ugly and beautiful partners, AND THEN doing the tests, the sheer number of conflating variables makes this kind of research worthless. I don't think even the clones would make the results valid given the variables that aren't genetic eg. upbringing, mood on the day, individual preference etc.

It comes accross as if they came up with the conclusion first, and then fit a flimsy experiment to prove the point. The correlations are no doubt statistically significant, but to imply that they mean anything without even attempting to isolate any other conflicting factors is a joke.

Human interaction is a complex system. There's every possibility that attractiveness does contribute to pair selection as the researchers assert, but what is the proportion of that influence? What billion other factors contribute? My guess is that you'll never be able to isolate just one factor that accounts for the bulk of the influence.

This is not to say that social science experiments can't be done right, but it's not easy. This kind of reductionist tripe only serves to muddy the really good research out there.

Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men

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