Neil Chethik's 'VoiceMale'

24 percent of husbands met their wives in school, some as early as elementary school. Those married more than thirty-five years were most likely to have met their wives in school (36 percent).

18 percent met their wives at a social event, such as a dance, party, or wedding.

18 percent were introduced to their wives by friends or family members.

14 percent met their wives at work. This figure has changed dramatically since the middle of the last century. Among those married more than thirty-five years, only 2 percent met their wives at work. This compares to 23 percent of those married in the past three years. This change is no doubt due to the influx of women into the workplace.

6 percent met their wives at a bar.

4 percent met their wives at church, at synagogue, or in another religious setting.

1 percent met their wives online.

Which kind of meeting results in the best marriages? My survey suggested that husbands who were introduced to their future wives by friends and family members were most likely to pronounce themselves happy in their marriages later on. The size of my survey sample was not large enough to confirm this as statistically significant, but my personal interviews supported the theory: Those who know us best may know what -- and who -- is best for us.

Because of the newness of online dating, no studies have yet been completed on whether marriages that begin online are more or less successful in the long term than those that start in more traditional ways. Online matchmaking tends to rely less on physical attractiveness (photos are usually available, but self-selected) than on résumés and self-descriptive abilities. I interviewed two men who had met their wives online, and the evidence was mixed.

One fifty-eight-year-old man who had left a long first marriage met his wife through an Internet dating service. "I put my set of criteria out there, and her name came up. I sent her my profile," he told me. Both were on spiritual quests, and they e-mailed back and forth on that and other subjects for four months before meeting at a restaurant. In person, they gradually warmed to each other. After several months of dating, they decided to move in together, and a year later they married.

When I spoke with the man, however, he and his wife had separated after three years together. He told me that his wife had been living alone as an adult for twenty years before marrying him; she could not get comfortable with sharing decision-making. In addition, he added, "I had difficulty expressing emotions." The fact that they'd met online, he believed, wasn't a factor in the split-up.

Another man, a fifty-one-year-old artist who had been twice divorced, told me he had met his wife in a chat room four years earlier. He found that "she was willing to go deep" in their e-mail conversations. When they met at a neighborhood bar after a few weeks, "I felt a spark immediately."

Now, two years into the marriage, the man says he's in this relationship for life. "We made all our mistakes in our previous relationships," he told me. He said that meeting online had been efficient because he hadn't wasted time dating women with whom he had little in common.

One question I'm often asked about mate selection is whether opposites attract. There is some evidence that they do. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, men often seek women who are open and expressive to complement their own less animated personalities.

But most of the evidence supports the theory that "like attracts like." Research over the past twenty years shows that men marry women who are comparable to themselves in age, height, socioeconomic status, political and religious orientation, even nose breadth, earlobe length, and consumption of cigarettes. My survey supported the likes-attract theory. For example, even though interracial marriage has been legal throughout the United States for more than two generations, the VoiceMale survey showed that, even today, only 5 percent of men marry someone of a different racial background. Another question I often hear about selecting a husband or wife is: When is the best age to meet a spouse? According to my survey, the most common time is between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four; more than a third of men reported meeting their future wives in this age period. But the survey showed that overall, the age at which a man meets his wife does not predict his level of happiness in the marriage. The age that a man meets his wife does apparently affect the subjects of disagreements that arise in these marriages. Couples that meet before the age of twenty-five tend to have more disagreements about sex, and more affairs, than those who meet at later ages.

One trend that is disturbing to social observers is the increasingly high expectations that both genders -- even before meeting their spouses -- place on marriage. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University published a survey in 2001 in which 94 percent of 20-to-29-year-olds agreed with the statement "When you marry, you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost."

The authors of the survey, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, said these results are troubling. "While marriage is losing much of its broad public and institutional character," they wrote, "it is gaining popularity as a SuperRelationship, an intensely private spiritualized union....Other bases for the marital relationship, such as an economic partnership or parental partnership, have receded in importance or disappeared altogether."

I interviewed Popenoe in 2004. At the time, he was seventy-one years old and had himself been married for forty-four years. He said that he believed men and women in today's marriage market would be more successful if they focused "less on finding the right mate than on being the right mate."

He worried that the soul mate expectation was feeding the high divorce rate. He said: "A surprising number of young people believe that there's one person out there who can complete them, one person who is chemically perfect for them. Once they get into a marriage and things go bad -- as they do at times in almost every marriage -- they think they've picked the wrong person." Their manner of dealing with this disappointment, Popenoe laments, is often to leave a marriage that may be salvageable.

Popenoe went on to say that the goal of having a soul mate is a good one, but "it's a lifetime goal. It's not a realistic goal in pursuit of a spouse. What is a realistic goal is to find someone who shares as many values with you as possible, so that you can become best friends." Ultimately, he believes, an enduring friendship is the foundation of an enduring marriage.