Humor: Actuarial Marriage Advice

It's an intriguing topic: Do you indeed live longer if you marry a younger woman?  Or is this kind of party talk total nonsense?

This time an 'actuarial marriage counseling blog' that gets serious  about this hilarious topic of age differences and mortality......

Research speaks...

While it had long been assumed that women with younger husbands also live longer, in a 2010 study Sven Drefahl from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany) has shown that this is not the case.

Some interesting an remarkable conclusions from Drefal's study:

• A woman's life expectancy is shorter the greater the age difference from her husband, irrespective of whether she is younger or older than him.
• However, the younger his wife, the longer a man lives. 
• Women marrying a partner seven to nine years younger, increase their mortality risk by 20% compared to couples where both partners are the same age. 
• But the mortality risk of a husband who is seven to nine years older than his wife is reduced by 11%.
   

Drivers

It's strongly doubtable if this mortality advantage of a man marrying a younger wife, is the reason why, according to Okcupid, a man - as he gets older - searches for relatively younger and younger women.

In general a man of age X searches a women with a lower limit age Y of :

Y = 0.5X + 7

Men, don't search a woman beneath this lower limit age border, unless you want to end up as sugar daddy........


What about women?
For women it's quite different:

In general women search for an older man. But as they grow older this effect shrinks.

Conclusion

Actuarial marriage advice is rubbish...
Don't follow statistics if you want to marry someone, follow your heart! ;-)

Related Links & Sources:
- Max Planck Institut: Marriage and life expectancy (2010)
 - OKCUPID: The Case For An Older Woman
- CBS News :Age gap Deathly (2010)
- Sugar daddy diagram ;-)