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Australian Survey Shows That Men Are Happiest With Educated Wives
From The Sydney Morning Herald
By Adele Horin
MEN in search of true happiness should steer clear of bimbos and dumb blondes: research shows men are happiest if they marry smart women.
Every extra year of education a wife has under her belt significantly increases the chances her husband will report being highly satisfied with life. But Shane Mathew Worner, of the Australian National University’s economics program, says it may be that an educated woman’s earning power is her biggest asset.
In a paper to be presented at the HILDA Survey Research conference this week, he says “the higher the education level of the wife, the happier the husband is.”
The study is based on a sample of more than 5000 Australians drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey.
Tango’s Take
Hmm. This sounds like advice that someone’s granny would give, ‘oh, don’t worry about those other girls with their breasts and blonde highlights and thong underpants, you’re a smart cookie. You just keep hitting those books and you can get a man to marry you.’ Some joking aside, this a nifty study. It looks like men perceive waaaay more benefit from marriage than women do. According to the survey, a man feels he has to earn an extra $136,000 to feel the same satisfaction as being married. He also is 135% likelier to be ‘highly satisfied’ with his life. Women feel they must earn an extra $122,000 but are only 52% more likely to be ‘highly satisfied’ than their single comrades. The most important part of the study was that a man’s likeliness to be happy is increased by 8% for every extra year of education that his wife has. Women are not (according to the study) affected by their husband’s level of education but are happier when their husbands are smarter.
Note: $136,000 in Australia is about $117,000 US.
Note: Australians are a lot like Texans except they like rugby instead of football.
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1 Hatter // Nov 14, 2007 at 12:30 am
Hm. Makes sense, really. Education is expensive, and most of the time the educated will be the higher class. Thus, with a higher class of people, more income for the family, and less strain on the relationship.
Note that I’m not saying that money busy marital happiness, nor that you have to be rich to be smart. But they were talking about how many /Years/ of education you have, and even those four additional ones for a BA or a BS can cost.
Also, if Australia aims to be like Texas, I demand to know what your equivalents of our various cities are. Please supply the following:
-A city full of up-and-coming yuppies that likes to pretend it’s “high fashion” (Dallas).
-A city that will throw money at small businesses and almost revolves around its “creative class” (Austin).
-A city full of oil refineries where the water tastes like lighter fluid (Corpus Christie).
-A sector of your country (east, north, south, or west) full of horribly bigoted small towns (East Texas).
-Another city that revolves around its college culture, but with more rednecks/bogans (College Station).
-A city that will never escape the shadow of its larger copy just two hours north (Waco).
Of course, even if you could meet all the other requirements, you still couldn’t hit the final one:
-A city that doesn’t sell any alcohol whatsoever (Lubbock).
Note: This is not meant to poke fun at the Aussies (except for that last jibe). This is meant to poke fun at the ever-lovely state of Texas (which should not include Eastern Texas as plans are underway to make East Texas break off of the rest of us, float out to sea, and explode so as to create new waterfronts).
2 Maggie // Jul 21, 2007 at 10:04 pm
I’m just taking a wild guess here: but did the study control for income? In which case men’s educaiton didn’t make women any happier than their income did. . .but smart wives make husbands happier regardless of how much they earn.
Anyone have the actual study?
3 FaaLaveLave // Jul 20, 2007 at 9:08 pm
I have to tell you as a woman of 60+ that I am so sick of blonde hair being equated with being mindless that I could just vomit. This is a kind of racist/sexist brutality that is seldom, if ever, acknowledged.
I am, and have been all my life, a natural blonde. At over 60 I have few white hairs and, though a bit darker, my hair is still blonde. I am a registered nurse and am perfectly capable of intelligent thought and action.
Those of us born with it are constantly belittled by every brunette, bald, or bleach blonde in the world. (The bleach blondes feel “protected” as they are, after all, not really blondes.)
Take my word for it……..it is an accepted bigotry that I have had to put up with my whole life and it, like all forms of bigotry is very hurtful. Please THINK and cease!
4 Marjani // Jul 20, 2007 at 4:52 pm
NO wonder my husband says he got turned on just listening to me talk. He said he was afraid to ask me out for two years for fear that I’d think he was “stupid.”
Laughing out loud.
5 kbbate // Jul 20, 2007 at 7:12 am
I find this type of study fascinating. Why ARE men 135% happier being married, to women’s mere 52%? Almost all the women I know — 40 and 50-something professionals/artists/writers/moms in the DC area — are far more dissatisfied in their marriages than their similarly educated and employed husbands.
Are women, as one friend theorizes, simply hardwired to be dissatisfied and unhappy? Would any spouse or any life (or is the grass greener?) make them feel this way? I find myself envying men for that extra 83%.
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