Marriage is important, not only as the fruits of the love among individuals or romantic love, but also as a means for forming relationships in the society. Today, however, there is a tendency to pursue after the marital satisfaction level among husban...
Marriage is important, not only as the fruits of the love among individuals or romantic love, but also as a means for forming relationships in the society. Today, however, there is a tendency to pursue after the marital satisfaction level among husband and wife instead of the marital life’s stability. Although there are many diverse elements that affect marital satisfaction level, importance of physical conditions and external appearance management behavior is increasing in case of marital life in addition to the selection of spouse prior to marriage when it comes to the world today when external appearance is considered very important. During the marital life, relationship between husband and wife may weaken when a spouse is negligent of the external appearance management through self management, which in turn may lead to disinterest. This in turn may produce various side effects when it comes to the relationship between husband and wife, which may even adversely affect husband and wife’s interaction. Likewise, importance of spouse’s external appearance when it comes to marital satisfaction level is increasing. Given this background, this research targets married men and women to study how spouse’s external appearance management behavior is manifested and to analyze the correlation among spouse’s external appearance management behavior and marital satisfaction level in order to examine how positive and proper external appearance management behavior affects marital satisfaction level. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to serve as the base data for sustaining healthy marital life, for improving relationship between husband and wife and for sustaining marriage.
To fulfill this research’s objectives, married men and women who reside in Seoul and Gyeonggido were targeted to distribute 700 questionnaires. Among them, 616 questionnaires were used for the final analysis. This research was conducted from February 25, 2011 to March 14, 2011. Collected data was subjected to analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) WIN 18.0 program as well as Frequency Analysis, descriptive statistics, Independent t-test and Crosstabulation Analysis. To verify the reliability level of each survey, Cronbach's ɑ value was used while Pearson's correlation Analysis was conducted to study the correlation among satisfaction level towards body type and marital satisfaction level. Empirical analysis for this research was verified at the 5% significant level for all the elements.
The research results are as follows.
First, analysis on the married men and women’s perception of spouse’s external appearance demonstrate that men consider external appearance as an important element compared to women. External appearance is considered an important element when selecting the spouse prior to marriage, and subjects wish that the spouse would be thin and attractive even now. For marriage life as well, subjects responded that the spouse’s external appearance is not only an important element for happiness, but also one’s attitude when treating the spouse changes when the spouse is attractive. It is possible to see that women are more interested in external appearance management and try hard to manage their external appearance. The most importance aspect of spouse’s external appearance is that men prioritize body figure and face in the order listed, while women prioritize personal hygiene and body figure in the order listed, which manifest the difference along the gender line. Men tend to be more interested in awareness of spouse’s external appearance, interest level and degree of importance compared to women. During marriage life, men consider external appearance as important while women prioritize personal hygiene over external appearance.
Second, analysis of the spouse’s external appearance management behavior for married men and women demonstrate that men are very interested in the spouse’s behavior for improving external appearance such as skin care, external appearance management behavior and behavior for managing plastic surgery, and that they actively agree with these efforts made by women. In addition, men tend to want for their spouse to purchase high end cosmetics, to get specialized care at specialized care centers or clinics, to make the effort to control their weight and to want to have or to have cosmetic surgery.
As for the areas that the subjects wanted to improve via plastic surgery, men cited breasts, eyes and nose in the order specified, while women cited wrinkles on the spouse’s face. As for the part that is most disliked when it comes to spouse’s external appearance management, both men and women cited spouse’s indolent self-management, which demonstrate that spouse’s external appearance management behavior is an important element of marriage life. Meanwhile, women tend to prioritize the overall image of youth more so than the spouse’s external appearance.
Third, men tend to be more satisfied with marriage life. There is a difference among men and women when it comes to the spouse’s external appearance management behavior and husband and wife relationship since men cited that they had considered even extramarital affair when the spouse was insolent in self-management as this affects even the frequency of sexual intercourse. Accordingly, in case of men, it was demonstrated that the spouse’s external appearance management can affect sexual life or motivate them to enter into extramarital affair, which shows that spouse’s external appearance management affects men’s marriage life.
Fourth, both men and women manifest positive correlation (r=0.341, r=0.293) when it comes to the marital satisfaction level following satisfaction level towards the spouse’s body figure. As such, marital satisfaction level is higher when one is satisfied with the spouse’s body figure and marital satisfaction level is also higher when the spouse pays attention to own external appearance before meeting others. In other words, satisfaction level towards the spouse’s body figure and interest in the spouse’s external appearance affect marital satisfaction level as well.
Fifth, analysis of marital satisfaction level by each BMI of the spouse demonstrate that men tend to be more satisfied with marriage life when their spouse tends to be in the low weight group and least satisfied in case of the obese group. Marital satisfaction level tends to decrease as the spouse’s BMI moves closer to the obese group. Meanwhile, women do not manifest consistent tendency among the spouse’s BMI and marital satisfaction level. In other words, men’s marital satisfaction level increases when the spouse’s BMI are lower. As such, spouse’s body figure affects marital satisfaction level more for men than women.
Although this research targeted married men and women, it is significant in the sense that correlation among external appearance and external appearance management behavior and marital satisfaction level were analyzed as these can react as other variables besides variables such as age, education level, number of years married, occupation, communication between husband and wife and attitude towards gender roles and others that affect marital satisfaction level at a juncture when external appearance is being prioritized every day. Hopefully, the research results will serve as a basis for proper external appearance management behavior and it is desired that a direction for improving husband and wife relationship can be presented as a result.