Are Married People Happier?

The cautious answer to this question is, yes: married people do appear to be happier than people who are not married, including people who are never married. And, in fact, contrary to the assertion made in The Guardian, marriage appears to make women happier than men.

But this is a difficult relationship to unpack, and not only because happiness is a hard concept to measure. That really is a small part of the problem since we can ask people subjective questions like “On a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life right now?”

The larger issue is that people who are happy with their lives are also more likely to get married.

But we can find ways to deal with this problem using data collected from the same individuals over multiple waves that track them from the years before they are married to the years after they are married. Evidence published by John Helliwell (and Shawn Grover) in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds that marriage makes people happier and that they continue to be more satisfied years into the marriage.

Marriage might make people happier, but it is no guarantee of happiness.

There two things that are really interesting about this research. The first is the biggest effect of happiness and marriage takes place when people are middle-aged—which, it turns out, is the least happy stage of our lives. That gap in happiness between the married and unmarried is narrower when people are younger and starts to disappear after the age of 60.

The second really interesting finding here is that the biggest boost to marriage is among people who consider their partner their best friend—which, in this data at least, is only true in about 50% of the married people surveyed. It seems that the most important factor here is not so much marriage per se, as it is about having a friend who is there by your side when life becomes challenging.

Finally, let's point out that the differences in happiness between married and single people might be statistically significant. But they are not large. Not only is the gap small, but there are wide distributions in the level of happiness—so much so that many single people are happier than the average married person. And many married people are less happy than the average single person.

Marriage might make people happier, but it is no guarantee of happiness.

Are Married People Healthier?

Again, here the answer appears to be yes. Married people appear to be healthier and live longer than those who are single, separated, divorced, or widowed. They have better mental health, fewer health conditions, and recover faster from illness.

In the past, studies found that marriage provided more health benefits to men than women, but that effect is disappearing, and more recent studies find pretty similar outcomes for men and women.

But there are few caveats here.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that people who are healthy are not only more likely to be married but they are also more likely to stay married since serious health problems put stress on relationships. This makes it even more difficult for us to unpack the causality here on whether or not marriage itself makes us healthier.

The second is that most of this research has been done in the United States, where individuals who married are significantly more likely to have health insurance. We have to be careful because is not entirely clear that the strength of this relationship would hold up in countries like Canada, with universal health care.

There is also substantial evidence that while being happily married might make us healthier, being unhappily married is very bad for your health. Research finds that compared to individuals who were in “very happy” marriages, those who were “not too happy” are twice as likely to report poor health and have significantly higher mortality rates.

But not only are these people less healthy than people who are happily married—they are less healthy than people who have never been married, and people who are divorced.

There is also a very real possibility that doctors approach seriously-ill patients who are married differently than they do patients who are single, and evidence backs this up. A recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine finds that one of the reasons that married people are likely to survive cancer—a phenomena that was previously explained as married people have “more to live for”—is that doctors assume that single people do not have the social supports to endure more aggressive treatments. If doctors are biased against single people in a way that leads to worse health outcomes, then some of this effect we are seeing really has nothing to do with the benefits of marriage.

Finally, social supports matter here. But it appears that this relationship between better health and marriage is eroding over time—that marriage provided better insurance against poor health in the past than it does today. There are many reasons for why we might see this, but the most obvious is that single people today are far less isolated then they were in the past—in part, because there are so many of us and also—it seems to me—because we are taking care of one another.