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A good example of assortative mating

Like will find like even if they have to do a lot of searching

How do you find the perfect partner? Study their diplomas. Marriages that make the grade are built on equal educational backgrounds, according to a scientific survey. University dons have discovered that it is not class nor money that best form a long-lasting relationship but your schooling. An analysis of thousands of couples across Britain found that 60% of marriages were between couples of similar scholastic ability.  The research suggests that a meeting of the minds like Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, and Gwyneth Paltrow, the Hollywood actress, is a marriage made in academia if not heaven. While he got a first in ancient history at University College London, she studied the history of art at the University of California.

Economists who carried out the research, based on more than 3,000 couples, produced a set of so-called mating equations to calculate who will marry whom. They found that women of medium educational level were 22 times more likely than women of low education to marry a highly educated man. “The educational system can be seen as a marriage market with students searching among other students for a mate,” say the Dutch researchers in a report being published this week in the Review of Economics of the Household. The research was based on 3,070 couples who had at least one child and who were born between 1940 and 1970. Detailed data on their education, social background and other factors were pulled together and analysed at the University of Amsterdam.

The results show that education is the key determining factor in forming a relationship: 59% of couples have the same levels of education, while in 29% of marriages the man has a higher levels of education. In only 12% is the woman more educated. The report says that the number of men who marry women with a lower education was at a maximum among men born in the 1950s. Since then it has been declining. The results also show that the age gap between men and women in a relationship has risen from one year among those born in the 1950s to three years. Just why is not clear.

The report shows too that education also affects the speed with which couples get married and have children. Lesser educated women wait longer after finishing education than more educated women ...

Tracey Cox, a former women’s magazine editor and author of Hot Relationships, also believes a compatible level of education is important. “Opposites attract for sex, but they don’t generally work long term,” she said.

From The Times

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, July 14, 2005 at 10:27 AM in No particular place to go
Comments (5) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by friedrich braun on July 14, 2005, 11:36 AM | #

All it means that people date their classmates while at university.

Posted by Mark Richardson on July 14, 2005, 12:04 PM | #

Well, I’m part of the 29%. It’s not that I didn’t want to marry a uni educated woman, I just found such women too much influenced by feminism and therefore not very family oriented.

Posted by R J Stove on July 14, 2005, 12:18 PM | #

It’s odd. I grew up in an environment where just about every adult was an academic married to another academic; and I’ve never seen a more miserable gaggle of couples in my life!

With very few exceptions, they seemed to be (a) either noisily and venomously divorcing one another over periods of years (this was before no-fault divorce became all the rage), or else (b) married for the long term, but in a perpetual state of cold war between husband and wife. (Anybody who remembers the Noel Coward song “We’re a dear old couple and we hate one another” will know what I mean by .) It was as if each person had deliberately chosen to marry his or her deadliest academic foe, rather than run the risks of educational exogamy.

Altogether it rather resembled the sort of wedded “bliss” featured in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I remember thinking “I’d rather marry a cleaning-lady with an IQ of 55 than have the sort of marriages they’ve got.” But perhaps others have contrary experiences; I don’t know.

Posted by Guessedworker on July 14, 2005, 12:44 PM | #

I remember reading long ago, during a period in my life when I had decided that some sort of familiarity with the life of the mind might make a change from compression ratios and high-lift camshafts, that it was in the nature of Woman to choose.  And it is.  Accordingly, men are never better than “catches”, the desirability of which is measured - ultimately - by exteriorities like power, wealth, fame or some more elusive internal characteristic like charisma, experience, even selfishness in some cases.

Sexual attraction, as Zsa-Zsa Gabor once said, lasts two years.

Posted by jonjayray on July 15, 2005, 12:06 PM | #

I rather agree with Stove.

I have had a lot to do with both bourgeois and working class women over the years.  Being myself bourgeois but of working class origin, I am comfortable in either milieu.

And the working class women were a lot more sensible—devoid of the many hangups and requirements that bourgeois women tend to have.

I would recommend an intelligent working class girl to any man.  You’ll have an easier and more relaxed life.

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