Tame your man by marrying him

Tired of feeling embarrassed by your man’s crass behaviour? Want him to start acting ‘better’? Then marry him. Here’s why. According to these findings, tying the knot may be the answer to his foul moods, temper flares and out of control behaviour. In the study which appears in the December Archives of General Psychiatry, S. Alexandra Burt and colleagues tracked 289 pairs of male twins (more than half of them were identical) for 12 years, from age 17 to age 29. By the age of 29, the unmarried men had an average of 1.3 ‘rebellious’ tendencies, compared with 0.8 among married men. However, among the identical twins in which one was married and one wasn't, the married twin had fewer ‘negative’ qualities after his union, suggesting that marriage helped remove those unsavoury behaviours. Why and how does marriage affect men’s behaviour? Experts are baffled, but Ryan King of the University of Albany reckons that it may be because married men "have more to lose" if they're caught doing illegal activities, and may care what their spouses think. "Not everyone is equally likely to enter the institution of marriage, but those that do enter into it get some benefit from it," King noted.