If you're a man and have ever wondered why it is your wife takes so dang long to get ready to go anywhere, you need to read this post in Psychology Today. Here's the jist: It says that one of the indicators of marital stability is that the female is - and remains -more attractive than the male for the duration of the marriage.

Experts in caveman psychology (how they got the cavemen to cooperate, I don't know) love to tell their exasperated girlfriends that they can't commit because males are biologically programmed to spread their seed in as many flowerpots as possible. Magazines like Maxim and Men's Health are contractually obligated to run this myth story every decade, alongside an educational illustration of the starlet-of-the-month eating a popsicle in a plaid mini-skirt.

Another bit of pseudo-science now accepted as fact is the idea that, when it comes to sex, men are primarily stimulated by visuals. Females, however, tend to become aroused aurally (a word whose homonym I could use with equal accuracy, but I won't because I don't want to upset my mother). In real life, this means that men chase bikini models and women chase good karaoke singers - and you need only to hang out in a Chinese restaurant bar on a Friday night to know this theory has some truth to it. A paunchy, middle-aged car salesman in a cheap cabana shirt who does a passable version of the white-man anthem "Takin' Care of Business" will be surrounded by women well out of his league, while Susan Boyle will still be buying her own drinks at midnight. This premise also applies whenever you see skinny, greasy rock stars who never call their moms with their tongue down the throat of a homecoming queen.

So this latest bit of anthropological insight would have us believe, based on the above, that if a woman wants to get married and stay married, she must look good and stay looking good. Otherwise your man will likely become dissatisfied and start dragging the weekly kill to a skinny Cro-Magnon who, because she's not raising his spawn and hunting and gathering herself, has the time to do a full-body shave and put on a saber-tooth necklace. Lucky for men, women still appear to be just as accepting of ear hair, flat butts and short-bus fashion sense as they were when Larry King was being raised by wooly mammoths.

Look at it this way, guys: The next time the woman in your life spends the rent on cosmetics or takes two hours to get her hair just right, she's doing it for the sake of your relationship. So be quiet and read a magazine. Who knows? You might just discover the latest scientific evidence that you can increase your lifespan by collecting power tools you'll never use.

Posted: Thursday, May 13 2010 at 11:46 AM

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