"Don't Become Happier Than Your Wife"

While The Online Scum usually concerns itself only with hashing matters, every once in a while a non-hashing story comes along that we feel is so potentially important to our readership that we feel compelled to publish it. Here is one yesterday from the New York Times.

Don't Become Happier Than Your Wife

If you are happier than your wife, you may be at greater risk of divorce.

That is the main takeaway from a new working paper looking at happiness and divorce rates in Australia. From the abstract:

Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of well being inside couples. … [C]ouples are more likely to breakup when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavorable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband.