WHOM SHOULD YOU marry?
This may be the most consequential decision of a person’s life. The billionaire investor Warren Buffett certainly thinks so. He calls whom you marry “the most important decision that you make.”
And yet people have rarely turned to science for help with this all-important decision. Truth be told, science has had little help to offer. Scholars of relationship science have been trying to find answers. But it has proven difficult and expensive to recruit large samples of couples. The studies in this field tended to rely on tiny samples, and different studies often showed conflicting results. In 2007, the distinguished scholar Harry Reis of the University of Rochester compared the field of relationship science to an adolescent: “sprawling, at times unruly, and perhaps more mysterious than we might wish.”
Dispatches From The Front 