The Magic Marriage Formula Revealed

So much for candlelit dinners, romantic weekends away and showering your other half with compliments ...

Scientists reckon the secret to a happy marriage is easy -- the woman should be smarter than the man and at least five years younger.

They developed a distinctly unromantic formula to predict how compatible a couple are, based on their ages, education and relationship history.

Academics studied interviews of more than 1500 couples who were married or in a serious relationship. Five years later they followed up 1000 of the couples.

From this they were able to work out the factors that create a marriage made in heaven, and those that doom a relationship to failure.

They found if the wife is five or more years older than her husband, the couple are more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age.

Where the husband is the elder by at least five years, the couples are less likely to part, according to the academics, including Dr. Emmanuel Fragniere of the University of Bath.

The finding predicts a healthy future for pop star Beyonce Knowles, 28, and rapper husband Jay-Z, 39.

Jay-Z is older, but Beyonce has the better education, as her hubby failed to gain a diploma at high school.

The research might be less popular with actor Michael Douglas, 65, and his 40-year-old wife, Catherine Zeta Jones.

While they satisfy the age gap, they fail on another factor. The study found that a relationship is more likely to fail if one partner has a history of divorce -- and this is Douglas' second marriage.