Marriage an £18,000 joy (for men)

Since it tends to be the girls who dream of their perfect wedding day, you might imagine that they would put a high price on the happiness it brings.

But thanks to an Australian economist, it has been revealed that while men value getting married as £18,000 worth of joy, that trip down the aisle is only worth £9,000 to the ladies.Mind you, when it comes to divorce the girls are far less traumatised – equating their feelings of loss with just £5,000 where men's devastation feels like they've lost a whopping £61,500.

The calculations are the work of Paul Frijters, an Australian university professor, who has spent eight years studying the effects of major life events on 10,000 people.

Volunteers were asked to rate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of zero to 10 – the most common number given being eight.

But these ratings changed after life-changing events, allowing Professor Frijters to assign cash values to the happiness created by marriage, divorce and illness.

Professor Frijters explained to the Telegraph: "These are real people to whom unexpected things happen.

"They were not selected because these things would happen and, because of that, we can accurately compare their happiness before and after."

The striking thing about the study is that men seem to put a higher value on those moments that we might expect a woman to treasure.

For instance, the birth of a child scores more than £18,000 for a man, but just under £5,000 for a woman.

However, some of the findings fitted more closely with the gender stereotypes we're all familiar with.

Women feel a boost of around £1,500 when they move house. It may not seem like much, but for the boys there was a definite feeling of loss... around £9,000 in fact.