For guys who want to live longer, happier and more productive lives, marry younger women.

For girls who want to enjoy to the max all the blessings of life, the same is true — older husbands may be their best partners.

A new research shows that older men who marry much younger women tend to live longer than those who marry women of more or less the same age as them.

The study says there has always been a tendency for older men to partner with younger women. In less developed, traditional societies, males are about 5 to 15 years older than their female partners. In the United States and Europe, guys are an average of two years senior to their partners.

More interesting, when old men father children, their genes seem to increase the lifespan of both sexes over evolutionary time, the study shows.

Women often lose their reproductive capacity around age 50, but if men can still reproduce into their 70s, Charles Darwin would say it’s advantageous for males to live longer lives as long as they can mate with a woman capable of reproducing.

Natural selection should favor longevity-boosting genes, which would get passed down from fathers to both sons and daughters. So women would benefit as well in future generations, the scientists say.

Result: Over time, the older-guy-with-younger-gal lifestyle would lift the lifespan ceiling for both men and women in the next generations and so on.

But why do men choose younger mates and females prefer older men?

“There is a lot of evidence from evolutionary psychology that men are seeking younger women and women are seeking older men,” said anthropologist Martin Fieder of the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the current study.

Cases in point: At the age of 26, Anne Nicole Smith married 89-year-old Jeremiah Howard Marshall II. And in 1995, actor Tony Randall, then 75, married and had two kids with Heather Harlan, who was 24 at the time. Last month, 90-year-old Nanu Ram Jogi from India reportedly became the world’s oldest father when he announced his 21st child.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that older men have more resources to protect and care for the family, while younger, more fertile women give their male partners better means of passing along genes.

In a study of about 10,000 Swedish men and women, Fieder and his colleagues have found that men had the most children if they were partnered with women about six years younger than themselves.

So the benefits of “age-defying” couples go both ways. Plus, the human species gets a boost.

“By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes,” said study team member Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.

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  1. Couples » Age-defying couples are the happiest

    25|Sep|2007

    [...] Tim Walter wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptSo the benefits of “age-defying” couples go both ways. Plus, the human species gets a boost. “By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes,” said study … [...]


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