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A smart wife has a husband who lives longer
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
In Scotland, experts have stated that a wife's intelligence influences her husband's life expectancy, so if a man wants to live longer, he should choose an intelligent woman as his life partner.
The study was conducted in the city of Aberdeen, where scientists observed the health of married twin couples who had been married for quite a long time. As a result, it was found that the husbands of intelligent women suffered less often from degenerative changes in old age, and men had fewer cases of Alzheimer's and senile dementia. In addition to longevity, the husbands of intelligent wives lived happier, compared to those who chose a poorly educated and dim-witted girl as a wife.
According to the famous psychiatrist Lawrence Walley, it is the high intelligence of the wife that can protect a man from senile dementia, but in what way exactly the intelligence of a woman contributes to a happier and longer life of her chosen one, experts cannot yet say for sure; perhaps more research will be needed to establish this.
Experts have long proven that the main protection against dementia are intellectual games, which not only protect the brain from degenerative changes, but also strengthen memory. It is possible that women with a high IQ also train their man's brain, like intellectual games.
Summing up their work, the Scottish scientists regretfully noted that most men, when choosing a life partner, first of all pay attention to the girl's appearance, and only then to her "brains", perhaps for this reason, men live fewer years than women in the world now. Scientists recommend that women develop their "inner world" in order to live a long and happy life with their chosen one.
Another study conducted at Yale University found that people who read books live longer than those who do not like to read, and in this case it does not matter what type of literature - modern novels or classics - reading books on average prolongs life by 2 years.
The study involved over 3,500 people aged 50 and over, all volunteers filled out questionnaires with questions about health and reading. Based on the questionnaires, the scientists divided the participants into 3 groups - those who do not read books, those who read a little more than 3 hours and those who read a little less than 3 hours a week. As it turned out, women with higher education and a high income level like to read books the most. The health of the volunteers was monitored for over 10 years, as a result of which the volunteers from the "regularly reading" group had a lower probability of premature death, in this group people lived on average 2 years longer than those who did not read books at all.
The researchers also controlled for gender, health status, type of employment, age, race, presence of depressive disorders, and marital status, but the relationship between reading and life expectancy remained.
Scientists noted that reading in general, whether it be magazines, newspapers or periodicals, can increase life expectancy, but still reading books remained in first place.
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