Partner Article

The perfect wife found

The formula to the ideal wife has been found: husbands should look for a wife who is smarter and at least five years their younger, say University researchers.

These pairings are more likely to go the whole nine yards, especially if neither has been divorced in the past, according to Bath University team.

Researchers studied interviews of more than 1,500 couples who were married or in a serious relationship, with the work published in the European Journal of Operational Research.

They found that if a wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than those couples of the same age.

Dr Emmanuel Fragniere and colleagues said men and women choose a spouse “on the basis of love, physical attraction, similarity of taste, beliefs and attitudes, and shared values,” but using objective factors such as age or education “may help reduce divorce.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .