介绍:
A Point of View: Why short men make better husbands
Just a few weeks ago, an interesting and lengthy paper by a pair of sociologists from New York University made a lot of noise in the community of short men.
Its subject was what is called assortative mating - the way people divide themselves up, two by two in that ark-like fashion, for life. It was one of those wonderfully solemn sociological papers in which the utterly self-evident is systematically recast as the cautiously empirical.
The authors point out early on in their report that "social psychological research suggests that attractive people are favoured in numerous situations" and soon after we learn that attractive and physically fit men report going on more dates and having sexual relations more frequently than others.
But the conclusion of the paper, once one has weeded through, is striking and well documented. It is simply that short men make stable marriages. They do this in circumstances of difficulty and against the odds and consistently over ages and income groups, and they do it with the shorter women they often marry, but also with the taller women they sometimes land. Short men marry late but, once they do get married, tend to stay married longer and presumably they stay happily married, too.
Many assertions about the assortative can be put forward to explain why this is so, but it is not hard to figure it out. There is a simple reason short men make stable marriages. It is because short men live in a world of taller men and know that any advantage seized is better kept.
One of the most interesting findings of the study is that short men actually do less housework in a typical marriage than tall men do - though the study points out delicately, this may be because with tall men, "the nature of their housework is different".
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