The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage and Happiness

When a social scientist "proved" that married people are happier, the media had a field day. But are we even asking the right question?

Photo by Javier Sánchez Mingorance/Canva

As a child, I knew two things about my future to be true: One, I would someday be a writer. Two, I would never, ever get divorced.

There were a few kids in my class with divorced parents, and their lives struck me as horribly disjointed. They constantly had to schlep between different houses with different rules and different parents, sometimes losing track of what was where. I appreciated that I had all my things in one place, and I cherished how close-knit my family was, even if my own parents didn’t always get along. The only downside of my stable childhood was that I couldn’t become the tortured writer we love to celebrate, one whose genius was forged by early years full of misery and trauma.

That I would marry someone eventually was a given. Even on the heels of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement, in which both my parents took part, I was still fed a steady diet of “damsel in distress meets Prince Charming” stories. I spent quite a bit of time pontificating on who this Prince Charming might be, and whether we would live in a mansion or (God forbid) an apartment, during recess games of MASH.

Whomever I ended up marrying, I knew we would weather all of life’s storms together. We would stick it out until death do us part. Because when I make a commitment, I like to follow through.

It strikes me as the epitome of irony that I now find myself separated, staring down the barrel of the D word, unsure what awaits me on the other side.

With the exception of my estranged husband and his mother, most people in my life have been supportive and understanding throughout my separation. But still, I wonder what some of them are really thinking. I wonder this because until fairly recently, when I heard news of someone else’s pending divorce, I was the one offering support and understanding while also feeling subconsciously smug because I wasn’t ever going to just “give up.” Other people could do this, and I would respect their choices. But I would never wreak this sort of havoc on my family.

Well, the havoc has now been wrought. In the process, I’ve come to understand how fiercely our society still clings to the stories we tell ourselves about marriage and nuclear family—the same stories I’ve been telling myself for years. Even though divorce memoirs are flying off bookstore shelves, even though non-monogamy is on the rise, and even though women are opting out of marriage and motherhood at unprecedented rates, it is still difficult to shake the stubborn narrative that marriage leads to lifelong bliss. Or, if not bliss, at least relative contentment and security.

This stubborn narrative also seems to be receiving reinforcement from academia, most recently by emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago Sam Peltzman, who released a paper in 2023 that examined the 2022 General Social Survey (GSS) results and found a “surprising” correlation between marriage and happiness.

The resulting slew of reactive news stories and opinion pieces was almost giddy. Emanating from them was an air of faux-surprise with distinct “I told you so” undercurrents. From The Atlantic: Take a Wife … Please! Why are married people happier than the rest of us? From Gallup: Married Americans Thriving at Higher Rates Than Unmarried Adults. From The New York Times: To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career.

Divorcees and single ladies and all you new-fangled non-monogamous folks beware, these stories seem to warn. Society was right all along about this marriage thing.

And of course, this being the Internet, there was the magnification effect. Even though some of the stories do acknowledge the questions and contradictions that emerge when you dig into the data, they are now widely referenced as proof that marriage “makes” us happier.

As a case in point, a rather snarky New York Times book review of This American Ex-Wife (one of many divorce memoirs in my very long queue by Substack writer lyz) critiques the author because:

She’s dismissive of studies that show divorce can be detrimental to children, and she omits whole bodies of research indicating that married people are happier than unmarried ones.

Slate has already called into serious question the coverage of studies about the allegedly traumatic effects of divorce on children, including the ways mainstream media outlets have largely ignored studies proving otherwise. For instance, a study of 131 children from a single California county that reinforced the “divorce = childhood trauma” narrative was cited six to 14 times more often by the media than a far more significant longitudinal study of 1,400 children that found “the vast majority of kids of divorce [become] well-adjusted adults.” Decades later, the results of inferior studies peddled by the Marriage Industrial Complex continue to be widely believed and casually cited, even by well-respected publications with robust fact-checking departments.

Google, of course, helps drive this magnification effect, so much so that when you search for “divorce effects on children,” as I have, you are deluged by dire warnings about children who are maladjusted, mentally ill, and criminally inclined. (The aforementioned Slate article is buried on page 5 of my search results.) Similarly, a Google search for “marriage happiness” yields snippets like:

Married people tend to be far happier than those who are not, according to new data…

Despite changing public views, the truth is married people really are happier...

Married people, particularly those aged 25 to 50, consistently reported higher levels of well-being compared to singles...

Married people are much happier than the unmarried, according to these data...

Married women and men both see a 20-percentage-point advantage compared to unmarried same-sex peers...

These brazen conclusions rub me the wrong way, and perhaps for obvious reasons. As someone who was unhappy enough in my marriage to ask for a separation, I have difficulty relating to all this satisfaction and contentment I was apparently supposed to be experiencing. And it’s not that I want other married people to be miserable — it’s just that I'd like to have an equal shot at happiness on the other side of divorce.

But the attention-grabbing headlines and snippets rub me the wrong way for deeper reasons, too. Perhaps that’s because the institution of marriage has a long history of commoditizing and subjugating women. Today, we might wax poetic about romance and love, but gender inequities in heterosexual marriage still abound.

Studies from Gallup, Pew Research Center, The Lancet Public Health, the National Library of Medicine and other sources too numerous to list show that even when men and women contribute roughly the same amount to the paid economy, women consistently put in far more unpaid hours at home. When it comes to marital strife, we cloak the cultural devaluation of women’s labor and time as an individual “communication problem” rather than a systemic driver of inequity and misogyny.

So if anyone is going to promote the institution of marriage with bold claims about its potential for making us healthier and happier, I really hope they have done their due diligence and thought everything through.

Unfortunately, that’s not what I’ve found.

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The first question we should be asking ourselves here is whether or not we’re even asking the right question. Because given the context of our current social realities, why is a correlation between marriage and perceived happiness really all that surprising? Why is it even newsworthy?

After all, “love and belonging” rank third on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the association between perceived well-being and belonging is well proven. If you have a child in middle school, like I do, this desperate need for belonging stares you in the face, terrifies you, and breaks your heart on a regular basis.

Despite the fact that nearly four in 10 U.S. adults (ages 25-54) are unpartnered, we still live in a society in which marriage is our primary means of accessing emotional intimacy, connectedness, and belonging, In fact, with the increasing isolation of nuclear families and steep declines in friendship and in-person social engagement outside of romantic relationships, this might be even more true now than it was a few decades ago.

New York Times columnist David Brooks tells us, “There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life,” and then uses this evidence to make the case that marriage matters more for our happiness than our careers. The underlying assumption is that marriage is our only means of accessing an intimate relationship. Interestingly, he wrote this column three years after his scathing article in The Atlantic, The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake. Even those who are actively and publicly questioning modern family structures still consider marriage to be the default.

There is also still a significant stigma attached to singledom, particularly for women and particularly for women over 30. Even The Atlantic story, Take a Wife… Please! Why are married people happier than the rest of us?—one of the many overhyped articles filled with knee-jerk reactions to Peltzman’s paper—ends with this admission from the author: "For me, getting married is more optical than emotional. I’m tired of being a woman pushing 40 who has a 'boyfriend.'"

It’s hard to feel happy about being single or unmarried when we’re constantly being told it’s not really okay. And the “marriage Kool-aid,” if you will, is thrust even more forcefully upon women in many religious communities. When I heard about Peltzman’s paper, my first question was, “What percentage of people surveyed identify as religious?” Interestingly, not many other people seemed to be asking that question. According to a 2019 study:

“Existing literature has provided ample evidence indicating a positive relationship between marriage and happiness across many countries except Taiwan, where marriage seems irrelevant to happiness. No research to date has empirically shown what exactly contributes to such a phenomenon. This study, using the Taiwan Social Change Survey for 2012 as the study sample, found that religion strongly matters in determining the linkage between marriage and happiness. More specifically, results strongly indicate that married people are happier among Christians, but such phenomenon is unobserved among people affiliated with other religions.”

Considering the extensive degree to which Peltzman's paper has been cited by Christians as statistical proof of the sanctity of marriage, these results are not surprising. When religion is your means of belonging, and when your religion preaches that marriage is part of God’s plan, and when women in particular are told that their life’s purpose and self-worth hinges on marriage and procreation, true believers will do what it takes to convince themselves that they are happy in their holy unions.

And honestly, who can blame them?

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Here’s the thing about “proving” a correlation between marriage and happiness, though: there’s no control group. In fact, married people are the control group, the ones perpetuating the status quo. Then we “inject” others, if you will, with doses of non-monogamy, singledom, and divorce, and we want to know which group is happier. But single, divorced, and non-monogamous people aren’t controlled for factors like access to the social status, legal protections, and financial incentives that marriage affords.

Why did LGBTQ+ activists fight for same-sex marriage? They wanted equal social standing. And as the Human Rights Campaign points out, they also wanted access to the more than “1,100 federal rights and responsibilities associated with the institution.”

“Are married people happier?” is, without a doubt, the wrong question. Because really—duh. It’s a no-brainer that people who aren’t in actively miserable marriages—or, crucially, who have yet to admit to themselves that they are in actively miserable marriages—perceive themselves to be happier. After all, they’re in the “in” group. They not only enjoy an increased sense of belonging, but also very tangible legal and financial protections.

Here’s the question we should really be asking: Why, despite all of the emotional, social, financial, and legal benefits of marriage, are such an astonishing percentage of us opting out? Nearly 1 in 2 U.S. adults are unmarried, which includes those who have never married or are divorced or widowed. There is about one divorce for every 2.5 marriages and remarriage rates have experienced steep declines.

Here’s a related and equally important question: Why are women opting out at higher rates? While nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women, women are not more likely to initiate non-marital breakups. And for divorcees and widows, women are significantly less likely to remarry.

In an ironic twist, even the author of the aforementioned The Atlantic article, Take a Wife… Please!, has—after getting married and having a baby—changed her tune. Her recent article, Doomed to Be a Tradwife, bemoans the inequitable dynamics that so many women face and asks if marriage can ever be truly equal.

Stories that promote the institution of marriage by stoking ill-founded fears about the misery and ill health awaiting the unmarried only perpetuate a status quo that is clearly not serving a significant portion of the U.S. population, particularly the female portion.

Here’s what I would like to see (Peltzman, please take note): a longitudinal study that compares the relative happiness of economically stable people in status quo social settings to economically stable people in socially supportive cohousing communities and/or cooperative childrearing networks where emotionally intimate relationships abound, but where marriage is not the default.

Then let’s see if the stories we tell ourselves about marriage and happiness actually hold water.

This story has gone through quite a few iterations over the past months, and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD, Zawn Villines, and Feminista Jones for speaking with me and offering their expert insights.