Hit With the Ugly Stick

Another news story with my comments interspersed. . .

The best marriages are those where women marry men who are less attractive than themselves, research has found.

Psychologists who studied newlyweds found men who were better-looking than their wives were more likely to be unhappy and have negative feelings about their marriage.

Whenever a story talks about measuring things like attractiveness, you know it's going to be worthless. Better looking? What units are those again? centilookers, or is it Wayne and Garth's scale, I forget. Must be the ISO beauty standard, revision 2 most likely.

In couples where the wife is more attractive, both partners tended to be very content.

That depends on who's doing the evaluation, both as to attractiveness and as to contentment.

Did the researchers tell the couples which one was more attractive? if not, doesn't that indicate a pre-existing bias in minds of the participating couples? If so, doesn't that bias the sample too? Either way, won't that affect the findings?

If they were evaluated by someone else, what does that tell us? Only that the finding are valid for those people evaluating the beauty of the subjects, nothing more. Change evaluators, and the results change. There is just no way to measure beauty.

The research, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, suggests that, in evolutionary terms, women are less choosy about their man's looks as long as he is able to help them reproduce.

Men, however, are programmed to choose a mate who is most likely to pass on their genes and look for youth, health and physical attractiveness.

Programmed? Doesn't that imply organization, hierarchy and order?

The tests involved 82 couples married within the previous six months.

Six months? They know enough to measure contentment after six months?

This whole article raises the question of why these couples get married in the first place. if the men really found their wives unattractive, why marry? Also, what kind of moron volunteers for a study and brags about being more attractive than his wife. The fact the participants are evaluating others based on physical appearance indicates a certain shallowness among the participants.

My guess is they are not content because they are stuck on themselves. It has nothing to do with their spouse.

Nothing about these articles makes any sense.