Person. individ. 013 Vol. 15, No. 6, pp. 125-121, 1993 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved Ol91-8869/93 $6.00 + 0.00 Copyright 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd Personality, sociosconomic status and age disparity in marriage DUNCAN CRAMER Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LEI I 3TU, England (Received 15 February 1993) Summary-The Freudian-derived hypothesis that spouses married to much older partners are more neurotic than spouses married to similarly aged partners was tested on a nationally representative British sample of 1573 female and 1455 male white participants married for the first time. The hypothesis was not confirmed in men or women with either the Neuroticism scale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory or the 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Contrary to American studies, greater age disparity in marriage was not associated with lower socio-economic status either for women, or for men when men’s age was controlled. Extraversion, Neuroticism and the GHQ were negatively correlated with age disparity for women. INTRODUCTION In many cultures it is customary for the husband to be older than the wife (Buss, 1989), although the mean difference in age between spouses varies considerably. In Western Europe it has been estimated as 2.9 years, in Eastern Europe 3.2 years, in Asia 4.7 years and in the Middle East 5.3 years (Dixon, 1971). In the West at least, marriages in which the wife is somewhat older or much younger than the husband are relatively uncommon and may be subject to unfavourable social comment. Blood and Blood (1978), for example, refer to marriages in which the wife is 4 or more years older than her husband as “mother-son” marriages and marriages in which the husband is 11 or more years older than his wife as “father-daughter” marriages. Relatively little research appears to have been conducted on the antecedents and consequences of age disparity in marriage. Hicks and Platt (1970), in their review ofresearch on marital happiness and stability, state that husband-wife similarity in age is positively correlated with marital happiness but do not cite any evidence to support this conclusion. While Schmitt (1969) presented divorce statistics from Hawaii suggesting that age dissimilar marriages were more likely to end in divorce, both Terman (1938) and Vera, Berardo and Berardo (1985) did not find a statistically significant association between marital happiness and age disparity. As Terman (1938) pointed out, marital happiness is unlikely to be related to age difference in marriage if the needs of both partners are met. One factor found in the U.S. to be related to age difference in marriage is socio-economic status, with greater age differences being associated with lower status (Atkinson & Glass, 1985; Vera et al., 1985). Much earlier, Freud (1905/1953) suggested that young men who fall in love with older women or young women who fall in love with much older men may have an incestuous fixation of the libido. Furthermore, he proposed that neurotic individuals are more prone to incestuous fixation (Freud, 1916-1917/1961). Since individuals in Western societies tend to marry for love (Burgess & Wallin, l953), men married to older women and women married to much older men should be more neurotic, according to psychoanalytic theory, than men and women married to those closer to their own ages. The primary aim of this paper was to determine whether this is the case in a representative sample of British adults. A secondary objective was to find out whether the association observed in the U.S. of lower socio-economic status with greater age disparity in marriage applies to Britain. Finally, in view of the paucity of research in this area, a third and more general purpose was to explore the relationship between age disparity in marriage and various personality and socio-demographic measures. METHOD The data were taken from the 1984/5 Health and Lifestyle Survey, which constituted a nationally representative sample of 9003 British adults (Cox, Blaxter, Buckle, Fenner, Golding, Gore, Huppert, Nickson, Roth, Stark, Wadsworth & Whichelow, 1988). The present study was based on white respondents who had only been married once and who returned a self-completion booklet. This booklet included the 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ: Goldberg, 1972), which measures non-psychotic psychiatric disorders in community surveys, and the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI: Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964) which consists of an Extraversion, Neuroticism and Lie scale. Neuroticism was measured by both the GHQ and the EPI Neuroticism scale, which show a substantial positive correlation (Cramer, 1991a). Since the Neuroticism scale assesses a neurotic predisposition whereas the GHQ is more an index of transient psychological distress (Cramer, 199 I b), the Neuroticism scale may provide a more appropriate indicator of what Freud meant by neuroticism than the GHQ. The following 5 socio-demographic variables were also selected for analysis: (1) own age; (2) spouse’s age; (3) highest educational qualification coded as 6 levels; (4) Registrar-General’s 6-point index of social class based on head of household; and (5) present household income grouped into 12 categories. Information on all 8 variables was available for 1573 women and 1455 men. RESULTS The means and standard deviations of these 8 variables are shown separately in Table 1 for the total sample of women and men, together with the age difference between marital partners which is the respondent’s age minus their spouse’s 725