Married People Happier, Religious Married People Happiest

[Michie]

If sitcoms, movies, opinion pieces, and mainstream editorials were our only source of information, we’d have to conclude that marriage is a path to misery, the “old ball and chain” that only ties us down, limits our freedom, and stifles our sexual fun. Many people think of marriage less as “settling down” and more as “settling,” especially young people, who are told, “You’ve got plenty of time, live a little, first” (as if life ends after the wedding).  

The truth, however, is that marriage is, statistically, the single best predictor of long-term happiness. Writing at UnHerd, sociologist Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies’ David Bass pointed to new research from the University of Chicago that suggests that “Americans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless.” And, it’s not just a little bit happier. According to Wilcox and Bass, there is a “startling 30-percentage-point happiness divide between married and unmarried Americans.” 

In other words, in America, the happiness divide and the marriage divide are largely the same. Sam Peltzman, lead researcher behind the University of Chicago paper, isolated all other factors among thousands of respondents, including income, education, race, location, age, and gender. “The most important differentiator” when it comes to who is happy and who is not, he concluded, is marriage. “Low happiness characterizes all types of non-married,” Peltzman writes, whether divorced, widowed, or never married. “No subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.” 

Continued below.

Married People Happier, Religious Married People Happiest

Statistics back up God’s good plan for humanity and for His creation.

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[Josheb]

Three thoughts:

In most (if not all) sitcoms with a family as the vehicle, the husband is a buffoon, the wife is shrill, the children disobedient and one of the kids is the smartest in the bunch.

We humans have A LOT of scientific research proving what makes individuals, marriages, and families happy. After WWII the government funded thousands of research studies and over the course of many decades we've accumulated piles of data. The government and society's other institutions ignore most of it when setting social policy, but it's there. The efficacy of marriage is proven, and repeatedly so. We also know a great deal about what makes marriage work, and what doesn't.

Many of the universities in the US gather their research data on marriage and publish it every ten years under the National Marriage Project (not to be confused with organizations with similar names). It's predominantly secular but the data is unbiased and many of the studies are done by researchers who are Christians. Some of its publications are available to the general public but it takes a database subscription to access the original research.