Men have one more reason and a good one at that to marry women much younger than they are.
A recent study showed that those who marry younger women tend to live longer.
However, the reverse is true for women. Women who land themselves younger husbands have a shorter life expectancy.
The survey, by Germany-based Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, covered 1.9 million married people, aged 50 and above, between 1990 and 2005 in Denmark.
Still, the couples and singles who spoke to my paper laughed off the findings, saying instead that love, rather than age, is what binds two persons together.
Civil servant Oliver Chia, 32, whose wife is six years younger than him, said that the study might matter to the older generation of Singaporeans as a man was often viewed as having to provide for his wife.
"So a man needed to be of a certain age and status. But I don't think it applies to my generation," he said.
Health-care professional Goh Chen Si, 30, who married a man 11 years older than her, also dismissed the findings.
"When you meet someone you are attracted to initially but do not know him or her very well, such studies might be a consideration. But once emotions are involved, it doesn't really matter what research says," she said.
Dr Tan Chue Tin, a psychiatrist at Mount Elizabeth Medical Centre here, said that the study's results for men marrying younger women "provide a statistical verification of a commonly observed phenomenon".
But young wives in such marriages could be under a lot of stress, he noted, because the qualities that attract them to older men could attract other younger women, too.
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