Researchers from the Geneva School of Business have developed a formula for increasing the chances of having a long-lasting and happy marriage by up to 20%. It's based on a variety of factors that tend to impact most marriages: age, cultural background, and intelligence. Ideally, the husband should be five years older than the wife and they should share the same cultural background, but the wife should be around 27% smarter than the husband, though a range of being 13% to 35% smarter is acceptable, according to these researchers.
More about marriages, relationships, and formulas:
- A pop cultural formula for determining whether it's appropriate to have an intimate relationship with someone is the half-your-age-plus-seven rule. For example, by this rule, a person who is 30 would be OK having a relationship with someone who's 22, but no younger.
- There's also a formula for finding the ideal age to propose. To calculate it, a person takes the oldest age that he or she would consider being married (A) and then subtracts the youngest age at which he or she would want to get married at (B) from it. He or she then multiplies the result by 0.368, and adds the result to B.
- The marriage rate of those 18 and older in the US decreased 5% between 2009 and 2010, going down to about 51%.
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Discussion Comments
Maybe it's about having the wherewithal to humor or tolerate his particular "deficits"!
I have little faith in quantitative measures for this type of study. Relationships cannot be reliably understood by statistics.
Two things:
1) There is the joke about the wife who, while at a party, discovers he husband has a mistress. The wife demands a divorce. The husband tells her that her lifestyle will then go bye-bye.
The wife thinks about it, and as she does, a known mistress of another enters the room. The wife says "Our whore is prettier than his."
2) A study noted the happiest marriages are where the woman gets her way. Would this study indicate how smart she is to achieve it? (Unexpected consequence: it still puts the onus on the woman! Dagwood/Blondie syndrome?)
Intelligence in what way? The intelligence to know how to lie in a way that seems plausible? Then, when confronted with the truth, she's smart enough to lie her way out of that? Is that intelligence that will be healthy and conducive to a healthy, happy, and constructive relationship? Not hardly.
Is this general intelligence or a subset? There is also emotional age. Was this factored in? There is the statistic of the approximately 10 percent who break the rules. Was this factor weighed? As with all studies, how was success defined -- money, children, social standing or what?
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