7NEWS - Mar 25 - The divorce rate in Switzerland is ~25%, which is ~20% points below the rate here in the United States. Swiss statisticians said they've developed a formula to increase a couple’s chances of attaining a happy marriage. They said the ideal wife she should be five years younger than her husband and come from the same cultural background. Researchers also said the wife should be exactly 27% smarter than her husband.
The full article was originally published at 7News, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: That explains everything. Irena and I are deliciously happy, 5 years and 2 babies into our marriage. She's 7 years younger and has an IQ about 25% higher than mine. Trust the Swiss to come up with this formula. Hmm, I wonder how Basisnote is doing on SwissFriends.ch?
The original paper is
"Optimizing the marriage market: An application of the linear assignment model"
Nguyen Vi Cao, Emmanuel Fragnière, Jacques-Antoine Gauthier, Marlène Sapin and Eric D. Widmer.
it says:
"We use data from the 1999 Swiss contemporary family survey by Widmer et al., 2003. This is a representative random sample of 1534 couples, married or unmarried, ages 18–75, residing in the three linguistic areas of Switzerland. In 2004, the authors did a follow-up study on 1074 of those couples to determine how many had separated" page 548
"the best case is a couple with a total weight of 2.803, in which both partners are Swiss with no prior divorces, the woman has a higher educational level than the man, and the man is five or more years older than the woman." page 551
"As social diversity and individualism increase, the likelihood of finding an optimal match on all criteria becomes smaller. To solve this and related problems, our next step in this research will be to add more criteria, such as religiosity and personality factors, to our optimization procedure" pages 552 - 553
I had contacted the authors during October 2009 and pointed 3 serious mistakes there:
1) marital stability is not the same as marital satisfaction! A major factor in long-term marriage is the strength of the social sanctions operating against divorce. Many long-standing marriages are deeply miserable. One old couple famously said that they wanted desperately to divorce but were "waiting till the children were dead".
2) they not take into account personality similarity between mates in a couple or prospective mates.
3) they did not take into account women taking contraceptive pills.
paper "Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?" Alvergne & Lummaa (2010) suggests women under contraceptive treatment select better partners for long term mating.
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As for Basisnote, is a complete scam, a hoax.
Basisnote, GenePartner, ScientificMatch and other proposals offering DNA matching are based on the T_shirt Experiment that only proved:
normally cycling women (not pregnant and not taking contraceptive pills) are (temporarily) attracted by the perspiration scent of clothes used by men with a Major Histocompatibility Complex MHC more dissimilar to theirs,
and not proved: women attracted by those men for long term mating with commitment.
2 Scientific Papers debunk their claims.
1) "Human oestrus" Gangestad & Thornhill (2008)
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1638/991.full.pdf
"Only short-term but not long-term partner preferences tend to vary with the menstrual cycle"
2) "Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?" Alvergne & Lummaa (2009)
http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2009/10/07/1254931423-tree_final_proofs.pdf
".. whereas normally cycling women express a preference for MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) dissimilarity in mates, pill users prefer odours of MHC-SIMILAR men, indicating that pill use might eliminate adaptive preferences for genetic dissimilarity."
................
"Recently, Roberts et al. attempted to eliminate these potential confounds by adopting a within-subject design in which women's mate preferences were assessed before and after they began taking the pill. Women starting the pill showed a significant preference shift towards MHC SIMILARITY compared with three months before the pill was taken, a shift that was not observed in the control group of normally cycling women."
Posted by: Account Deleted | Apr 25, 2010 at 12:21 AM
Mark, my wife is 6 years younger and around 50% smarter than me (way better looking, too). We're 6 years and 4 babies into our marriage. Does this mean we'll be happier than other couples, esp. Swiss ones?;-)
Sam
Posted by: Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com | Apr 25, 2010 at 01:34 PM
Mark, thanks for thinking of us. Basisnote is doing fine, there are interesting news about us coming up soon. We'll keep you posted!
Eva
Posted by: Eva | Apr 26, 2010 at 10:11 AM
Shoot, my wife is only 26% cleverer than me. I clearly need to dumb down a bit... Time for another beer methinks.
Posted by: Dating Guy | Apr 30, 2010 at 09:28 PM