Are couples happier where the woman is more attractive than the man?

Are couples happier where the woman is more attractive than the man?

I want to discuss another topic from the Kanazawa article discussed on the Psychology Today blog (discussion and link in my post immediately below).  He asserted:

…couples in which the woman is more attractive than the man are happier than the couples in which the man is more attractive than the woman. Why is this?

It is therefore quite natural that a man (whether he himself is handsome or ugly) who is married to an attractive wife is happier than a man who is married to an ugly wife, because it means that his attractive wife has a high mate value. Similarly, since physical attractiveness is not what women seek in their long-term mates (husbands), even though it is what they seek in their short-term mates (lovers), having a handsome husband will not necessarily make a woman happy with her husband or marriage, unless he is rich and powerful as well.

   

As we explain extensively in Chapter 3 of our book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (“Barbie — Manufactured by Mattel, Designed by Evolution: The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Mating”), women’s mate value is primarily a function of their youth and physical attractiveness, whereas men’s mate value is primarily a function of their wealth and status. Men prefer to marry women who are young and beautiful, and women prefer to marry men who are rich and powerful. Of course, you don’t need no stinkin’ evolutionary psychologists to tell you that; your illiterate and uneducated great-grandmother, who never in her life set foot outside of her small village, knew that a hundred years ago. But she didn’t know why; we need evolutionary psychology to figure out why.

 

 

 What are your thoughts on these points?