[Hot] More single than married 2026

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Article:
An inclusive perspective on singlehood needs to include the single at heart. Claims that married people are happier than single people are ubiquitous
appearing in the popular media as well as scholarly publications. I want to explain why those claims are misleading and very often misunderstood.

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What if a drug company made the same claims? Suppose a drug company tested a new drug that was supposed to improve people’s happiness. The drug company lets people decide for themselves whether they want to take the drug. Of those who do
42% hate the drug so much that they refuse to keep taking it. Other people who started taking the drug stop taking it because they can’t access it anymore (maybe their pharmacy ran out). The people in the study then rate how happy they are
on a scale ranging from 1 to 4
with 4 being the happiest. This is what the researchers find: 3.3 from those currently taking the drug 3.2 from those who never took the drug 2.9 from those who took the drug but found it intolerable (42%) 2.9 from those who took the drug
but lost access to it. The drug company decides to set aside the people who are no longer on the drug. That seems fair to them. After all
they want to show that people taking the drug are doing better than people not taking the drug. So they submit their findings to prestigious medical journals
claiming that people who are taking their drug are happier than people who are not taking their drug. In the article they submit
they report the results for the two groups they consider relevant: 3.3 from those currently taking the drug 3.2 from those who never took the drug. The main point of their article is that their new drug works. People taking the drug are happier than people not taking the drug. The drug company also wants to advertise on TV
in magazines
online
and everywhere else. The point of their ads would be: Want to be happier? Take our new drug! No medical journal would publish that claim and the advertisements would be considered misleading. What’s wrong with the claim that people taking the drug are doing better than people not taking the drug
and therefore the drug works? Why can’t the drug company say that if you want to be happier
take the drug? The people in the drug trial were not randomly assigned to take the drug or not take it
they decided for themselves. That means that the two groups of people might differ in all sorts of ways
and it could be those ways
rather than taking the drug
that accounts for the drug group’s greater happiness. For example
maybe the people who opted to take the drug were more likely to be employed or to be advantaged in other ways and that’s why they were happier – not because they were taking the drug. The researchers only measured happiness at one point in time. Maybe the people who opted to take the drug were already happier even before they took the drug. Again
that could mean that taking the drug had nothing to do with their happiness. It is misleading to set aside the 42% of the people who took the drug
found it intolerable
and refused to keep taking it. That’s a lot of people – almost half! Aren’t their experiences relevant to the claim that the drug works? Aren’t the experiences of the people who started taking the drug and then
through no fault of their own
could not continue taking it
also relevant? Can you really say that the drug works when the people in those two groups actually do worse than the people who never took the drug? Suppose you saw an advertisement saying that the people taking the drug are happier than people not taking the drug
and decided to take the drug yourself. Maybe the drug doesn’t make you any happier. How would you feel if you found out later that there were big groups of people who had also taken the drug and were less happy than the people who never did take the drug? How would you feel then about the drug company’s claim that people taking the drug are happier than people not taking the drug? Someone deciding whether to take the drug has no way of knowing whether they will find it intolerable or end up losing access to the drug. They deserve to know that those two possibilities exist
and that they could end up less happy than if they opted not to take the drug at all. How Is This Relevant to the Happiness of Married and Single People? As you probably already figured out
the four groups are comparable to four marital status groups: 3.3 from those currently taking the drug (currently married) 3.2 from those who never took the drug (never married singles) 2.9 from those who took the drug but found it intolerable (42% of those who took the drug -- the people who divorced) 2.9 from those who took the drug but lost access to it (those who are widowed) I used those numbers because they are the actual results of a study that was widely cited when I first started studying single people decades ago. The authors
to their credit
were appropriately cautious about interpreting their findings. They did not make the claim that the married people were happier because they got married. Hundreds of studies like this have been published
and they are often summarized with statements such as
“Married people are happier than single people.” The problems are the same as the ones I described for the drug study. Married and single people differ in all sorts of ways. For example
in the U.S. married people are systematically advantaged by hundreds of laws that favor them. Single people
in contrast
are stereotyped
stigmatized
and marginalized. They are targets of discrimination
some of it quite serious.













more single than married