[Hot] Are married people happier than single people 2026

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Article:
Some of them seem to come back from the dead years after I publish them. Seemingly out of the blue
people will be reading them
pinging them
and tweeting them. Thats been true of something I first published here in March of 2013
Every time you hear that getting married will make you happier
read this.

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But thanks to a heads-up someone sent me
I now have at least a hint as to why that post has had several new lives. It turns out that at Quora
a very popular question-and-answer site
that blog post was given as an answer to the question
What percentage of married couples are truly happy? That was in 2015
and the answer was viewed more than 10
000 times. Now another two years have passed
and there has been a resurgence of pings and such back to the post in just the last few weeks. I dont know which spirit has possessed the post this time
but Im grateful for it. Im delighted in the interest in the question of whether getting married makes you happier or healthier or makes you live longer or improves your self-esteem and all the rest. Ive been trying to debunk those claims
study by study
for two decades. Im going to republish the original blog post below
but Im happy to add here that there has been great progress in debunking the myths about marrying in the years since that post first appeared. This year
2017
has been a banner year for toppling the myth that people who marry have better health than they had when they were single. Ive had the honor of writing about that for high-profile places such as the opinion page of the New York Times and NBC News. I try to maintain an updated list of all my myth-busting writings here on my personal website. And now here is the original blog post. Every Time You Hear that Getting Married Will Make You Happier
Read This. In 2011
a group of authors analyzed the results of 18 long-term studies of the implications of getting married for happiness. They wanted to know whether getting married makes people lastingly happier. The answer was no. I described those findings in detail here
so Ill just offer a brief overview before telling you about how social scientists tried to salvage the case for marriage in a subsequent paper. This article is going to be longer than usual
because I want to be very clear about what is wrong with the arguments that getting married makes you happier (or healthier or live longer or have better sex or anything else). There is
though
a Bottom Line at the end of the article
so feel free to skip to that. Results of 18 Long-Term Studies. In all 18 studies
the researchers began asking people about their well-being (happiness
life satisfaction
or satisfaction with their relationship partner) before they got married and continued asking them the same questions for some time afterwards. They found no evidence that getting married results in lasting increases in happiness or life satisfaction or satisfaction with the relationship. A few things made the results especially striking. First
the design of at least half of the studies (and maybe as many as 16 of the 1 was biased in favor of showing positive implications of getting married. Thats because only those who got married and stayed married were included in the research. If you want to know whether getting married will make you happier
you need to look at all of the people who got married
and not just those who got married and stayed married. If you are thinking of marrying
you have no way of knowing for sure if you will end up staying married. The second remarkable thing about the findings is that there was only one hint
on only one of the three measures
that getting married produced any improvement in well-being. Right around the time of the wedding
people reported somewhat greater life satisfaction. However
that was just a honeymoon effect
and over time
it wore off. Over time
married people ended up no more satisfied with their life than they were when they were single. With regard to happiness and satisfaction with your partner
there was not even a honeymoon effect. Happiness did not change. On the average
satisfaction with your relationship was actually worse just after the wedding than just before
and it kept going downhill in the subsequent years. That should have put an end to all the mythology about how getting married makes you happier and more satisfied. But of course
it didnt. We are so attached to our beliefs in the mythical transformative power of marrying that even scientists wont let them go. Trying Again to Make the Case for Getting Married and Getting Happier. In the new study (probably one of the original 18
reanalyzed)
the authors looked only at life satisfaction and found the same thing as before. In analyses of just those people who got married and stayed married
there was a brief honeymoon effect around the time of the wedding. Then the married people ended up just as satisfied or dissatisfied as they were when they were single. So how did the authors find a way to make getting married look like a boon to happiness? First
they looked at normative changes in life satisfaction over the course of the adult years. Setting aside considerations of marital status
the study showed (as have other studies) that life satisfaction decreases over time. Then they looked specifically at the people who stayed single
and found that their life satisfaction showed some decrease over time. From that
they tried to make the argument that if the people who had gotten married and stayed married had instead stayed single
they would have been less happy. Here are some of the specifics. The authors tried to match each person in the got-married-and-stayed-married group to a similar person who had stayed single. Specifically
they tried to find a single person who was as similar as possible in age
sex
education and income. They didnt say when they assessed income. The matching was not totally successful. For example
the single people
on the average
were four years older than those who got married and stayed married. At the time of the marriage
those who got married and stayed married reported life satisfaction that was .48 of one point
on a 7-point scale
higher than the matched single people. In the years afterwards
that difference between the married and single people tightened
and those who married and stayed married averaged .28 of one point on a 7-point scale greater life satisfaction than those who stayed single. Heres what the authors said about their results: marriage is not associated with increases in long-term happiness
but people who get married are happier in the long run than if they had remained single. As I described previously
other people including social scientists who should know better seem to be using the results as evidence that if you get married
you will become happier. Whats Wrong with Using the Study to Claim that Getting Married Makes You Happier? There are at least two major problems: #1. Because the married people included only those who got married and stayed married
it is not fair or accurate to say
on the basis of the study
that people who get married are happier in the long run than if they had remained single. Married people who get married and then divorce become less happy over the course of their marriages. Findings suggest that they are generally not happier than people who stay single. (See
for example
pp. 36-37 of Singled Out .) On the average
their happiness does not begin to increase again until sometime after the divorce. #2. The authors are comparing the people who married and stayed married to those who stay single. They are saying that if the stay-married people had never married at all
their happiness would have been the same as that of people who stayed single. (So
over time
lower by less than one-third of one point on a 7-point scale. Remember
this is what we are talking about here: .28 of 1 point on a 7-point scale.) But the stay-married people and the stay-single people are different people. They may have different motivations
different values
different interests. They may be different kinds of people in ways we havent even thought of yet. Let me start with the people who stayed single.













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