What's the secret to a more satisfying marriage? Thinner wives, actually. Lay down the pitchforks, people - I'm just reporting the result of a new study:
Marriages are more satisfying for both partners when wives are thinner than their husbands, according to a new study.
The four-year study of 169 newlywed couples found that husbands were more satisfied initially and wives were more satisfied over time when the fairer sex had a lower body mass index -- a common measure of body fat. The study was published in the July issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science.
"There's a lot of pressure on women in our society to achieve an often unreachably small weight," said Andrea Meltzer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee and lead author of the study. "The great take-home message from our study is that women of any size can be happy in their relationships with the right partner. It's relative weight that matters, not absolute weight. It's not that they have to be small."
The perfect solution seems to present itself: husbands, chubbify yourselves!
In the traditional, Judeo-Christian, bond known historically as "marriage", the marriage is "satisfied" if both parties are able to remain faithful to each other and supportive of each other during their earthly tribulations; some of which include the lustful habits of mind. If satisfaction for this comes not in the form of helping one overcome lustful tendencies, but merely on sating those tendencies then it may only pass as "satisfaction" if anagogical progress is absent from the marriage contract.
Or marriage becomes what Erich Fromm called it; an egoism a deux, and in which both persons are commodities with various features with which they can haggle in order to sort out the most economic exchange of goods. In this latter framework, it is easy to see how greater sexual attraction is the equivelant of greater "satisfaction".
That was a hell of a tangent to go on.
A) From a legal perspective, a marriage is satisfied if people pay their taxes as married partners.
B) From a traditional religious perspective, a marriage is satisfied if man and woman remain faithful to each other until death and provide support for each other during temptation. They aren't even supposed to lust for each other, but are supposed to rely on each other when their lust is beyond their control.
C) From an egotistical perspective, a marriage is satisfied if everyone gets what they individually desire out of the marriage.
The claim that thinner women lead to more satisfying marriages could be taken as bearing some relation to B, but only where anagogical progress (spiritual progress) is not a dominant factor. For anagogical progress entails a dampening of the lustful habits of mind. Full spiritual attainment even suggests a loss of sexual appetite completely. But the claim would certainly be true of any usage of the term "marriage" in as narrow a sense as C.
Not at all practical. I burn it faster breathing than I can pile it on. =(