Aussie Men Are Happier When Their Wives Don't Work

Do you want to know how to make sure your marriage will work? All you need to do is turn the clock back about 50 years to the time when women stayed home and baked cookies while men were out there making the money. According to a newly published Australian study, the key to having a successful marriage is to follow traditional gender roles, as in make sure the husband is the one bringing home the bacon while the wife stays home. Sigh.

Roger Wilkins of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research collated data that found that men were much happier when their wives didn’t go out to work.

“There’s reasonable evidence that if the unemployment rate rises, particularly for men, it will have detrimental consequences for marital stability,” Wilkins said. “When you look at a men’s relationship satisfaction, it’s at its highest when their wife is not in the workforce. It does seem that that’s what is behind it; those traditional gender roles die hard. I guess all things being equal, man would prefer their wife at home and managing the household.”

The study further found that in cases where one partner worked over 50-plus hours a week, the rate of divorce and dissatisfaction in a marriage was not as high as when a wife out-earned her husband. Wilkins believes that stress and jealousy are two major factors that can offset balance in a marriage, and that tends to happen when a man is out of work or when he’s making significantly less than his wife.

A recent study found that men were more likely to have an affair if they were financially dependent on their wives. Then again, if you’re with a guy who’s still living in the '60s and can’t be genuinely happy that you’re making your own money by doing your own thing, then maybe you should really reconsider as to whether or not you really want to be with him in the long haul.

Because this study is sure to rub A LOT of women the wrong way, don’t worry. Here are three reasons why it’s total BS, according to science:

1. Stay-At-Home Dads Love What They Do

Despite certain men who have outdated views on gender roles in society, there is a good chunk of men out there who really don’t care. In a 2010 study of 1000 working dads, conducted by the Boston College Center for Work & Family, 53 percent of the men said they would consider staying home if their wives made enough money for their family to live comfortably. Further research found that most men who stayed at home did so by choice. While the rate of stay-at-home dads is still relatively low at 3.4 percent, that number has actually doubled in the past decade, and those men truly enjoy what they do.

“It’s clear to us that men strongly identify with this as a role,” Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family said. “They don’t have a feeling of ambivalence of, ‘What am I doing? I’m a man.’ There is no sense of angst. These guys strongly identify with being a stay-at-home-dad. They are proud of it.”

2. Men Like Smart And Successful Women

I know. Shocking, right? In a study released just last year, it was found that millennial husbands are the first generation to believe that having a wife who was equally or more educated than them wasn’t “threatening.” On the flip side, previous generations have found that marriages were more likely to last if the husbands were the breadwinners.

The study, led by sociologist Christine Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin, looked into data of married couples over a period of 50 years. It was found that for the younger generation, women who were less educated than their husbands were 40 percent more likely to divorce than those who were equally or better educated.

As Schwartz said, “These trends are consistent with a shift away from a breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage toward a more egalitarian model of marriage in which women’s status is less threatening to men’s gender identity.”

So, bottom line, if a man is secure with himself, as in, a fully-realized grown ass man, he won’t care whether you’re more successful than him.

3. Happy Wife = Happy Life

In a 2014 Rutgers University study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, researchers dug into the relationship of 394 couples who had been married for an average of 39 years. They found that when a woman is happily married, her husband’s overall life will be happier. If a wife is miserable, not only will the relationship suffer, but the husband will as well. Another 2012 study presented at the American Sociological Association meeting even found that working moms were happier and healthier than stay-at-home moms.

In general, when people are happy and content with their lives, they’ve pretty much figured out how to juggle every aspect of it from career to relationship to kids, if any. If a woman is happy in her relationship, that means she’s able to do everything she wants to do knowing that she has the support of her husband. So, if a wife wants to get out there and work on accomplishing her goals in life, then it’s only in a husband’s best interest to support her.

Images: AMC; Giphy(4)

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