When you’re look­ing, here are a few tips on choos­ing a mar­riage part­ner to increase your hap­pi­ness and mar­riage longevity, from a sum­mary of the research by Eric Barker:

  • There is mutual ide­al­i­sa­tion: “Spouses who ide­al­ized one another were more in love with each other as new­ly­weds. Lon­gi­tu­di­nal analy­ses sug­gested that spouses were less likely to suf­fer declines in love when they ide­al­ized one another as new­ly­weds. New­ly­wed lev­els of ide­al­iza­tion did not pre­dict divorce.” (Source)
  • Your part­ner has high self-esteem: On explicit mea­sures of pos­i­tive illu­sions, high self-esteem peo­ple con­tinue to com­pen­sate for costs. How­ever, cost-primed low self-esteem peo­ple cor­rect and over­ride their pos­i­tive implicit sen­ti­ments when they have the oppor­tu­nity to do so. Such cor­rec­tions put the mar­riages of low self-esteem peo­ple at risk: Fail­ing to com­pen­sate for costs pre­dicted declines in sat­is­fac­tion over a 1-year period. (Source)
  • The male has a high socio-economic sta­tus: Pre­vi­ous stud­ies in developed-world pop­u­la­tions have found that fathers become more involved with their sons than with their daugh­ters and become more involved with their chil­dren if they are of high socioe­co­nomic sta­tus (SES) than if they are of low SES. […] High-SES fathers [make] more dif­fer­ence to [their] child’s IQ by their invest­ment than low-SES fathers do. The effects of pater­nal invest­ment on the IQ and social mobil­ity of sons and daugh­ters were the same. (Source)
  • Your part­ner is con­sci­en­tious and slightly neu­rotic: Con­sci­en­tious­ness [demon­strates] a com­pen­satory effect, such that hus­bands’ con­sci­en­tious­ness pre­dicted wives’ health out­comes above and beyond wives’ own per­son­al­ity. The same pat­tern held true for wives’ con­sci­en­tious­ness as a pre­dic­tor of hus­bands’ health out­comes. Fur­ther­more, con­sci­en­tious­ness and neu­roti­cism acted syn­er­gis­ti­cally, such that peo­ple who scored high for both traits were health­ier than oth­ers. Finally, we found that the com­bi­na­tion of high con­sci­en­tious­ness and high neu­roti­cism was also com­pen­satory, such that the wives of men with this com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al­ity traits reported bet­ter health than other women. (Source)
  • Avoid ‘cheaters’ by trust­ing your instincts: The results of these exper­i­ments sug­gest that cheaters might look dif­fer­ent from coop­er­a­tors, pos­si­bly due to beliefs and per­son­al­ity traits that make them less ideal exchange part­ners, and the human mind might be capa­ble of pick­ing up on sub­tle visual cues that cheaters’ faces give off. (Source)
  • The female is the most attrac­tive part­ner: Rel­a­tive dif­fer­ence between part­ners’ lev­els of attrac­tive­ness appeared to be most impor­tant in pre­dict­ing mar­i­tal behav­ior, such that both spouses behaved more pos­i­tively in rela­tion­ships in which wives were more attrac­tive than their hus­bands, but they behaved more neg­a­tively in rela­tion­ships in which hus­bands were more attrac­tive than their wives. (Source)
  • The female’s par­ents are not divorced: Results demon­strated that women’s, but not men’s, parental divorce was asso­ci­ated with lower rela­tion­ship com­mit­ment and lower rela­tion­ship con­fi­dence. These effects per­sisted when con­trol­ling for the influ­ence of recalled inter­parental con­flict and pre­mar­i­tal rela­tion­ship adjust­ment. The cur­rent find­ings sug­gest that women whose par­ents divorced are more likely to enter mar­riage with rel­a­tively lower com­mit­ment to, and con­fi­dence in, the future of those mar­riages, poten­tially rais­ing their risk for divorce. (Source)

via @charliehoehn