Is Marriage Associated With Happiness For Men Or For Women? Or Both? Or Neither?

Here’s a fun research project for you.

Part 1

David Weakliem wrote:

On March 30, Nicholas Kristof had wrote:

Survey data indicates that married couples on average report more happiness, build more wealth, live longer and raise more successful children than single parents or cohabiting couples, though there are plenty of exceptions.

The most popular reader comment, with over 2000 likes, said

I notice that you didn’t talk about the research that shows differences in gender in marriage happiness levels. Marriage is generally GREAT for men, who report being far happier in marriage than being single. Much research indicates the reverse is true for women. Single women report being happier, in general, than married women are.

Most of the other leading comments were along the same lines.

Weakliem then looked up some data:

Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked whether “taken all together, how would you say things are these days.” 41% of married women say that they are very happy, and 8% say they are “not too happy” (the rest chose “pretty happy”); among single (never married) women, 23% say they are very happy and 17% not too happy. This is just one survey, but it’s one that puts a lot of effort into selecting a representative sample and gets a high response rate, so it can be considered to be pretty definitive. Of course, the difference in happiness between married and never-married women is not necessarily caused by marriage, but it’s there.

And he shares this graph:

The smug married of both sexes seem to be doing just fine. Weakliem continues:

I looked to see if the gap varied by other characteristics—for example, education, race, political views. To make a short story even shorter, I found nothing worth mentioning.

But he did find that men were more likely than women to say they thought that married people were generally happier than unmarried people. So that’s something.

This is all old data so it’s just male/female marriages. Same-sex marriage is another story; you can google *happiness same sex couples* and find some references.

To summarize the story so far, we’ve seen four perspectives:

Kristof: Married people are happier than single people.

Commenters to Kristof’s article: Married men are happier than single men; married women are unhappier than single women.

General Social Survey (via Weakliem): Married people are happier than single people, with roughly the same difference for men and women.

General Social Survey (via Weakliem): Men are more likely than women to think that married people are happier.

Part 2

This got me curious so I did some googling and found all sorts of things:

– This article in Psychology Today from 2022 states, “Married men are happier than married women, and unmarried women are happier than unmarried men.” But it doesn’t offer any citation for this claim, except a 2015 article in Psychology Today by a different author, which states:

Marriage, we have been led to believe, is a natural habitat for women, but a stifling cage for men. Thus goes the popular fantasy. However, in the real world of data, things shake out quite a bit differently. . . . confounding the view of marriage as the female heaven and haven is the fact that marriage actually appears to benefit men more than it does women. Research has shown that the “marriage benefits”—the increases in health, wealth, and happiness that are often associated with the status—go disproportionately to men. Married men are better off than single men. Married women, on the other hand, are not better off than unmarried women.

Interesting. This is basically the opposite of Weakliem’s take. Weakliem wrote that there’s a popular view that marriage benefits men but not women, but that actually the gap in happiness between married and unmarried is the same for the two sexes. This Psychology Today article takes the opposite position, stating that there’s a popular view that marriage benefits women more than men, but that actually the opposite is the case.

We know where Weakliem’s data come from—the General Social Survey from 1972 onward. What’s the source of the claims in the Psychology Today article? The “benefit men more than it does women” link sends us to an article in the journal Family Relations from 1991, “Marital Status and Personal Well-Being: A Literature Review,” which has a lot of things, but I’ll focus on the part on Happiness:

Self-report studies of happiness indicate that the married are happier than the unmarried (Bradburn, 1969; Bradburn & Caplovitz, 1965; Campbell, 1981; Glenn, 1975; Gurin, Veroff, & Feld, 1960; Schmoldt, Pope, & Hibbard, 1989) . . . Studies also indicate that married men are happier than married women. . . . Radloff (1975) found that men benefit more than women from marriage. . . . Virtually all data show that unmarried men have lower levels of happiness than their female counterparts. This holds true for never-married, widowed, and divorced males (Campbell, 1981; Gurin et al., 1960). . . . Studies also show that single women are often happier than single men. Gove (1972a, 1972b, 1973) explains that single women are more likely to develop strong social ties, such as close relationships with family and friends. Buffered by emotional support of others, these women, compared to unmarried men, report greater happiness. . . . However, they are not happier than married women (Tcheng-Laroche & Prince, 1983). . . . Popular folklore has it that marriage is a blessed state for women and a burdensome trap for men. In reality, however, men more than women, receive marriage’s mental health benefits because women, more than men, provide emotional aid and other support in marriage. . . .

The Psychology Today article also has a “happiness” link, which sends us to an article from the Australian Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2015. The link no longer works, but I was able to find the article on the Internet Archive. Here’s the relevant bit:

According to the [Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia] study of 20,000 people between 2001 and 2012, on a scale of zero to 10, married men in 2012 gave their relationship an 8.5, while women gave it an 8.2. . . . being married improves men’s sense of wellbeing, but doesn’t offer the same boost for women (though neither was it a negative). . . . The study also showed men’s sense of wellbeing and health benefited from being married, while women’s was not affected either positively or negatively by being married.

And then this:

The finding that marriage makes men happier but doesn’t affect women in the same way echoes other international studies.

Unfortunately, no links here, either to the Australian study or to the international studies. Some googling turns up this 2021 report from Australia, “Social determinants of subjective wellbeing” which states:

Married individuals (both men and women) experience higher levels of life satisfaction than those in other family arrangements (Evans & Kelley 2004). As well, transitions into relationships, marriage or cohabitation have been shown to significantly increase wellbeing, while transitions out of relationships due to separation or widowhood negatively affect wellbeing (Baxter & Hewitt 2014).

Following up on those references, Evans & Kelley 2004 write:

Men and men in formal marriages experience higher levels of life satisfaction than do people in other family arrangements. . . . In general, the average levels of life satisfaction of men do not differ from those of women within each marital status . . .

And Baxter & Hewitt 2014 write:

Men and women who are married have higher levels of wellbeing than those who are not married, although there are no significant differences in wellbeing between people cohabiting intending to marry and married. We find that transitions into relationships, marriage or cohabitation, significantly increase wellbeing while transitions out of relationships because of separation, or widowhood, negatively impact on wellbeing. We find no gender differences in these patterns and no significant differences between cohabitation and marriage.

That’s from 2014 and it’s based on that same Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia. I’m not sure what happened between 2014 and 2015 for the story to have changed so much.

I also found this 2019 report, “Are Married People Happier?,” from some organization called Population Europe, which states:

Numerous studies have been published that have examined subjective wellbeing (SWB) and marriage status, finding that married people tend to have a higher SWB. But in today’s society, more couples are opting for cohabitation, which includes many benefits associated with marriage. This then leaves the question of whether individuals who cohabit have similar levels of SWB as married people. Brienna Perelli-Harris, Stefanie Hoherz, Trude Lappegård and Ann Evans look more closely at this question by exploring the situation in Australia, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. . . . The authors used harmonized data sets from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the Norwegian Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) to analyse partnership status in midlife. They found that differences between marriage and cohabitation disappear in all countries once selection and relationship satisfaction are considered, which means marriage does not lead to higher SWB.

Just to clarify, that last statement (“marriage does not lead to higher subjective wellbeing”) is marriage compared to cohabitation, not marriage compared to being single. This indicates one of the challenges of following this literature: in some analyses, cohabitation is considered to be equivalent to marriage; in other analyses, cohabitation counts as single.

For the purposes of our investigation here, I’m most interested in married vs. single, and I’m inclined to think of cohabitation as just one form of marriage; this would be consistent with the above-cited article.

Getting back to the U.S., here’s a recent report of a recent Gallup poll stating:

Both married men and married women see a 20-percentage-point advantage compared to their same-sex peers who never married.

The report is called, “Married People Are Living Their Best Lives,” which is vivid, but, as a statistician, I wish they’d added “On Average” somewhere in that title.

But then there’s this article from 2019 which states:

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. . . . Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.

“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.” . . .

Dolan’s latest book, Happy Ever After, cites evidence from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which compared levels of pleasure and misery in unmarried, married, divorced, separated and widowed individuals.

But then a google of *paul dolan american time use survey* turns up this news article entitled, “A new book says married women are miserable. Don’t believe it,” which points to this series of posts by economist Gray Kimbrough, who wrote, regarding the claim, “healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children,” that “the ATUS lacks data on *ever* having children, but I can compare never/ever married with and without children in the household. This doesn’t back up his claim.” But I guess the erroneous reports will stay on the internet forever, for example here, here, and here.

Part 3

What to think here? What to do? I’m not sure. Here’s where we are:

– There are varying claims regarding the difference in happiness comparing married to unmarried men or women. Starkly different claims! Various claims are based on different surveys in different countries, but each claim is made in a different way, so it’s hard to know how to put all this together. Weakliem’s analysis of the General Social Survey seems pretty convincing, but there are lots of other studies out there.

– There are also varying sources of evidence regarding popular belief. Weakliem cites a mainstream newspaper columnist writing about the general benefits of marriage, but also a comment with thousands of likes expressing the belief that the research shows marriage to be associated with greater happiness for men and lower levels happiness for women.

– Muddying the waters are statistical complexities such as how the cohabitants are classified, and whether we’re talking about association or causation. There’s also the question of whether divorced people and never-marrieds are lumped into a single “unmarried” category; from the causal direction, there’s no reason to think that the effects of marriage would be the opposite of the effects of divorce.

For my purposes here, I’d just like to nail down the descriptive questions: (1) what are the average differences between married and unmarried men and women in happiness (and how does this depend on the measurement of happiness/wellbeing/satisfaction/etc. and the classification of cohabitants and never-married/widowed/divorced, and what’s the story with same-sex couples), and (2) what do people believe about that first question. I’m not so concerned right now about the causal questions; ultimately, yes, I do care about causal effects of marriage, but it would seem enough as a starting point to resolve the descriptive questions.

This seems like a fun research project. God is in every leaf of every tree and all that.