Having a boy-toy husband increases a woman’s chances of an early death.
And the younger her spouse is, the harder it is on a woman’s health, according to research carried out in Germany.
However, the trend is reversed when an older man opts for a younger woman. The more youthful his wife, the longer the husband is expected to live.
The trends were identified by an analysis of marriage and death records of almost two million Dutch men and women, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper reported.
A woman who bags a man seven to nine years younger is 20 percent more likely to die at any given point than someone married to a man her own age, the research found. And when a cougar weds someone more than 15 years younger, the risk soars to more than 30 percent.
“The greater the age difference, the lower the wife’s life expectancy,” said researcher Sven Drefahl of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. “The best choice for a woman is to marry a man of exactly the same age.”
A “sugar daddy” with a wife seven to nine years his junior is 7 percent less likely to die at any given time.