The pill alters men's attactiveness to women.

• Position: Contraception

Choosing a partner while on the pill may affect a woman's marital satisfaction, maintains a study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, and Florida State University, Tallahassee. In fact, the pill may be altering how attractive a woman finds a man.

The researchers examined 118 newlywed couples for up to four years. The women were surveyed regularly with questions asking them about their level of satisfaction with the relationship and their use of contraceptives. The results showed that women who were using hormonal contraceptives when they met their husband experienced a drop in marital satisfaction after they discontinued a hormone-based birth control--but what is interesting is how the change in their satisfaction related to their husbands' facial attractiveness.

Women who stopped taking a hormonal contraceptive and became less satisfied with their marriage tended to have husbands who were judged as less attractive. The women who were more satisfied after stopping contraceptive use had husbands who were judged as good looking. "Our study demonstrates that women's hormonal contraceptive use Interacts with their husbands' facial attractiveness to predict their marital satisfaction," says coauthor Andrea L. Meltzer, assistant professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

Specifically, women who met their relatively more-attractive husbands while using hormonal contraceptives experienced a boost in marital satisfaction when they discontinued employing those contraceptives. In...