Sure hope Flibbertigibbit reads this.

MONDAY, Sept. 1 (HealthDay News) — Whether a man has one type of gene versus another could help decide whether he’s good “husband material,” a new study suggests.

A study of Swedish twin brothers found that differences in a gene modulating the hormone vasopressin were strongly tied to how well each man fared in marriage.

“Our main finding was an association between a variant of the vasopressin receptor 1a gene and how strong bonds men reported they had to their partners,” said lead researcher Hasse Walum, of the department of medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “Men carrying this variant scored on average lower on a scale measuring the strength of the bond compared to men not carrying this variant.”

Women married to men carrying the “poorer bonding” form of the gene also reported “lower scores on levels of marital quality than women married to men not carrying this variant,” Walum noted.

His team published its findings in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Read the whole story in the Washington Post.