Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups.

The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.

Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.

Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.

The new study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, reveals looks continue to matter beyond that initial attraction, though in a different way.

Supportive spouses

McNulty's team assessed 82 couples who had married within the previous six months and had been together for nearly three years prior to tying the knot. Participants were on average in their early to mid-20s.

Researchers videotaped as each spouse discussed with their partner a personal problem for 10 minutes. The tapes were analyzed for whether partners were supportive of spouses' issues, which included goals to eat healthier, to land a new job and to exercise more often.

"A negative husband would've said, 'This is your problem, you deal with it,'" McNulty said, "versus 'Hey, I'm here for you; what do you want me to do?; how can I help you?'"

A group of trained "coders" rated the facial attractiveness of each spouse on a scale from 1 to 10, with the perfect 10 representing the ultimate babe. About a third of the couples had a more attractive wife, a third a more attractive husband and the remaining partners showed matching looks.

Trophy wives

Overall, wives and husbands behaved more positively when the woman was better looking.

The finding "seems very reasonable," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management. "Men are very sensitive to women's attractiveness. Women seem to be sensitive to men's height and salary," said Ariely, who was not involved in the recent study.

In couples with more attractive husbands, both partners were less supportive of one another. McNulty suggests wives mirror, in some ways, the level of support they get from husbands.

"The husband who's less physically attractive than his wife is getting something more than maybe he can expect to get," McNulty told LiveScience. "He's getting something better than he's providing at that level. So he's going to work hard to maintain that relationship."

Men who are more attractive than their partners would theoretically have access to partners who are more attractive than their current spouses, McNulty said. The "grass could be greener" mentality could make these men less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marriage.

Physical attractiveness of husbands is not as important to women, the researchers suggest. Rather, wives are looking for supportive husbands, they say.

So it seems the mismatch in looks is actually a perfect match. "Equitable is unlikely to mean the same on every dimension," Ariely said during a telephone interview. "It just means that overall two people make sense together."

Researchers prove love is indeed blind

WASHINGTON - Love really is blind, at least when it comes to looking at others, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday.

College students who reported they were in love were less likely to take careful notice of other attractive men or women, the team at the University of California Los Angeles and dating website eHarmony found.

"Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind," said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, whose study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior

"It's almost like love puts blinders on people," added Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA.

Gonzaga and Haselton asked 120 heterosexual undergraduates in committed relationships to examine photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex from an eHarmony website.

The volunteers were asked to choose the most attractive photos, and write an essay either about their current romantic partner, or the subject of their choice.

While writing, the students were asked to forget the "hotties" from the website, but told to put a check in the margins if they did happen to think of the attractive photos.

The volunteers who wrote about their partners were six times less likely to admit to thinking of the attractive others than volunteers who wrote about random subjects.

And, later asked to recall the cuties in the pictures, the students who wrote about their lovers remembered fewer details about the physical appearance of the attractive strangers.

"These people could remember the colour of a shirt or whether the photo was taken in New York, but they didn't remember anything tempting about the person," Gonzaga said.

"It's not like their overall memory was impaired; it's as if they had selectively screened out things that would make them think about the how attractive the alternative was."

© The Windsor Star 2008

Perfect 10s and the Odds of a Pink Nursery

It's no surprise to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently gave birth to a daughter, or that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes also are proud parents of a beautiful baby girl.

Good-looking parents are 36 percent more likely to give birth to a girl than less-attractive couples -- which also explains why women are, on average, better looking than men, argues Kanazawa, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Kanazawa based his conclusion on data collected during in-home interviews with 2,972 randomly selected young adults in 2001 and 2002. All were parents 18 to 28 years old, and they participated in the ongoing National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. As part of the study, the interviewer rated the respondent's physical attractiveness on a five-point scale that ranged from "very unattractive" to "very attractive."

Kanazawa compared the percentage of boys and girls born to study participants who were very attractive with the sex ratio of babies born to everyone else. He found that 56 percent of babies born to beautiful parents were girls. For parents in each of the other categories, fewer than half of the babies -- 48 percent -- were girls.

But why are beautiful people more likely to have girls? Kanazawa says scientists studying humans and other species have found that parents who possess any heritable trait that increases male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success will have more males than female babies, and vice versa.

Because men value physical attractiveness more than women do when looking for a mate, good looks increase the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons. So attractive people should have more daughters -- which is exactly what Kanazawa found.

His theory also suggests that, over time, women should have become more attractive than men. These data confirmed his hunch. More than half of all women in the sample -- 52 percent -- were rated as "attractive" or "very attractive," compared with 42 percent of the men.