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In the year 2000, having narrowly escaped the Y2K computer glitch, Americans should have been poised to party. The bendy riff of the Santana–Rob Thomas joint “Smooth” wailed from Top 40 stations everywhere. Survivor beckoned us to watch people eat grubs for a chance at $1 million. Brad and Jen got married, and the gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius asked acerbically, “Are you not entertained?”
But we weren’t. In fact, after chugging along steadily for decades, American happiness began to decline that year, modestly but definitively. A chart of American happiness ratings looks like this: a flat, basically happy line that starts in the 1970s, followed by a plunge into meh right around the new millennium.
The chart comes from a recent paper by Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago. For the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Peltzman looked at the General Social Survey, which since 1972 has asked thousands of Americans, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” If you imagine this large sample as 100 people, historically about 50 of those people say they’re “pretty happy,” and that’s still true. But in the 1970s, about 35 people would say they’re “very happy,” and 15 would say “not too happy.” That began to shift around 2000, and now about 32 people say they’re “very happy” and 18 say they’re “not too happy.”
To quote a Destiny’s Child song of that vintage, why the sudden change?
After slicing the demographic data every which way—income, education level, race, location, age, and gender—Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing: Married people are happier, and Americans aren’t getting married as much. In 1980, 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, but today, it’s 25 percent. “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness,” he writes.
Married people are much happier than the unmarried, according to these data. Looking at those same 100 people, 40 married people will say they’re happy, and 10 will say they’re not happy. But single people are about evenly split between happy and not happy. It doesn’t really matter if you are divorced, are widowed, or have never married: If you’re not married, you’re less likely to be happy. “The only happy people for 50 years have been married people,” Peltzman told me.
One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.
To be honest, this puzzles me, because after 13 years of cohabitation, I’m currently trying to get married, and it’s not making me very happy at all. I say “trying” because this event, which should be entirely within my partner’s and my control, instead relies on a sprawling, expensive bureaucracy that doesn’t always reply to my emails.
Marriage, in theory, doesn’t have to cost much; a license usually runs less than $100. In practice, though, the costs can be considerable. The average wedding now costs $30,000, according to a survey from The Knot. Prenups are becoming more popular; a Harris poll recently reported that 15 percent of Americans have signed one. And that leaves aside the psychic toll of checking in with, following up on, and coordinating all the marriage-adjacent entities that inevitably get sucked into the process.
Getting married, especially at an advanced age, is difficult and expensive even if, like my boyfriend and me, you’re not planning an actual wedding. As of this writing, we’re waiting on my prenup lawyer to get back to me, so that I can wade through a bunch of paragraphs that start with “Notwithstanding the forgoing” and identify any changes I’d like to make, so that my boyfriend’s prenup lawyer can then reconcile those changes and we can get the thing notarized. This will cost us at least $1,200 each, on top of the $600 we already spent drafting the prenup. (I didn’t think I needed a prenup, either, until I had a physical therapist who alternately kneaded my spine and regaled me with the story of her traumatic divorce that almost bankrupted her.) I’m not sure which is more magical: this, or picking out a health-insurance plan.
Even beyond the preparation stages, marriage has a reputation for sapping joy and freedom. Bachelorette parties are proclaimed to be the “last fling before the ring,” as though in matrimony you won’t be flinging much but emergency paper towels across the kitchen. The single life is freewheeling, fun, and fabulous; marriage is “settling down”—down to earth, to baseline, to not-too-happiness. How could something so boring and restrictive make people so happy?
Peltzman didn’t explore why married people are happier, but other researchers have, and they fall into two competing camps. Camp No. 1, that of cynical libertines like me, believes that marriage doesn’t make you happy; rather, happy people get married. One 15-year study of more than 24,000 Germans, for instance, found that those who got married and stayed married were happier than the unmarried ones to begin with, and any happiness boost they got from the marriage was short-lived. “Most of the research indicates that the happiest couples marry, not that marriage causes happiness,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a demography professor at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, told me over email. According to this theory, Americans stopped being as happy, and they stopped getting married, and either the two trends don’t have much to do with each other, or glum people aren’t in the mood for wedding planning.
The first camp’s argument makes sense if you think about the kind of person who gets married: This person has a sufficiently winning personality to run the gantlet of online dating. They are desirable enough to get their Hinge match to propose to them. They are optimistic enough to promise to love their Hinge match forever, forsaking all other Hinge matches. This person is, in other words, already pretty happy.
When people aren’t happy in marriage, they tend to divorce, which plunks them into the unhappy single pool and makes the married pool look happier by comparison. “We have very high expectations of marriage. So that tends to mean that people don’t get married unless they have a strong, close, and supportive relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “You’re not going to get married and then find that you are much more happy.” As the classic Adam Sandler sketch goes, you’re still going to be you on vacation. You’re still going to be you when you’re married. If you’re sad now, marriage probably won’t change that.
In Camp No. 2 are the romantics, who believe that getting married makes you happy, because there’s something special about marriage. In a research brief for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, the research fellow Lyman Stone crunched the GSS data again and found that getting married does boost happiness, for at least two years after the wedding, and it does so even when you control for the person’s previous level of happiness.
The logic of this camp goes as follows: Close, supportive, long-term relationships make you happy. Finding those types of relationships through friendships is possible, but it’s hard. People move away; they get busy. Most friends don’t buy houses or raise children jointly—the kinds of activities that glue people together and force them to cooperate. Marriage, says Andrew Cherlin, an emeritus sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, is “the usual way to find a durable, caring relationship that undoubtedly makes you happier than you would be if you didn’t have it.”
Perhaps the strongest evidence for this camp’s thinking comes from a 2017 study of thousands of British people that found that those who got married were more satisfied with their life than those who didn’t, even when you control for how satisfied they were before they got married. It also found that the married Brits were more satisfied years later (meaning the happiness boost wasn’t fleeting), and that marriage inoculated the couples somewhat from the midlife dip in happiness that most people experience. The people who felt the biggest happiness boost from marriage, that study found, were those who said their spouse was their “best friend.” Those people got almost twice as much satisfaction from marriage as other people did.
A spouse, then, is like a super-friend. Ideally, they’re “committed to spend their entire life helping you in everything that matters to you,” Stone says. A good spouse will buffer you from the stress of your job, your kids, your family of origin. They’ll give you emotional, and sometimes financial, support, allowing you to “feel and think with double strength,” as George Eliot put it. Because you live in the same house, your spouse is always there. (Boy, are they always there!) It can be exasperating—until the day comes when you really need a friend.
The question remains, though: Why get married? As a cohabitant, I feel I reap all the benefits of marriage without spending even a minute crying over caterers. In countries where unmarried cohabitation is widespread, relatively accepted, and stable, the arrangement can have similar benefits as marriage. One study of Germans, for instance, found that cohabitation leads to a happiness boost about two-thirds as big as that of marriage. (The study doesn’t explain the slight gap between married people and cohabitants, but it could be that some cohabitants aren’t quite happy enough with their partner to pull the trigger on marriage.) In these cultures, cohabiting partners act like pseudo-spouses, and they support each other in much the same way. “It’s the sharing of the stuff,” says John Helliwell, an emeritus economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the 2017 British study. “And the legal thing is probably the least important part of it.”
But in the United States, people don’t tend to cohabit for years and years (present company excluded). They just get married. “I’ve been waiting for Americans to have long-term cohabiting relationships like the Europeans do for decades now, and it hasn’t happened yet,” Cherlin says. Happy cohabiting couples don’t show up in the data because there just aren’t that many of us.
For me, getting married is more optical than emotional. I’m tired of being a woman pushing 40 who has a “boyfriend.” People keep asking me if I’m against marriage, and I have to sheepishly reply that it’s more that I’m against spending thousands of dollars on a piece of paper. But my partner has been by my side for 13 years. He’s the first person I call with good or bad news. He doesn’t like to be mean, but he will hate on my enemies with me when he can tell that I really want him to. I have a lot going on in life, and I want to plant a firm stake in shifting soil. He’s already my super-friend; now I just want to make it official.
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