By Kelsey Williams, SFGate.com
Ladies, if you’re down on your marriage, a new study suggests a diet and a treadmill could be just the ticket.
In the sitcom, “The King of Queens” Kevin James is noticeably larger than his on-screen wife played by Leah Remini. Should be a happy couple, according to this study. Photo: CBS
A study out of the University of Tennessee Knoxville suggests that the secret to marital bliss may just be a skinnier wife.
WRCB TV in Chattanooga, Tenn., reports:
A study by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, doctoral candidate Andrea Meltzer and psychology Associate Professor James McNulty shows married couples are happier when wives are thinner than their husbands.
Over the course of four years, Meltzer and McNulty followed 169 newlywed couples, tracking each partner’s height and weight and having each participant privately fill out marriage satisfaction surveys every six months.
The findings, after controlling for depression, income and education factors, showed that both men and women were more satisfied in their marriages if the wife had a lower body mass index (BMI) than her husband.
“We believe that the discrepancies between partners’ BMIs affected women only through their effects on men, which takes time to emerge,” Meltzer said. “In other words, we believe that the wives are happy because their husbands are happy.”
However, an essential clarification that the researchers were keen to highlight is that the key to happiness in marriage is not a supermodel skinny wife. Size 0 or size 16 was not the issue.
“Our study does not show that women have to be ‘thin’ in absolute terms,” Meltzer said. “Rather, it shows that women of any size can be happy as long as they are with the right partner. It’s relative weight that matters, not absolute weight.”
So, large women can be happy too, but with larger men.
