The Decline of Happiness and the Decline of Marriage

David Brooks devoted one of his recent columns to the subject of marriage.  “Marriage, not career, brings happiness” the headline reads.  The sub-headline:  “Intimate relationships affect everything else you do.”

 

Nothing new about that, we’d say. 

 And there are statistics that back it up, and there is another statistic that is alarming in this regard:  the decline and the percentage of adults who are married.  

In 1950, 78% of adults 18 and older were married.  That number has fallen by 30 percentage points.  It is now 48%.  I suspect there is a lot of loneliness and unhappiness tied up in that decline.

 

Last month, a University of Chicago economist, Sam Paeltzman, published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people.  Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried.  Income contributes to happiness, too.  But not as much.

 

As Brad Wilcox writes in his book, Get Married, “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life’s satisfaction in America.  Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545% higher for those who are very happily married compared with peers who are not married or who are less than happy in their marriages.” 

 

Why has the percentage of adults being married fallen so far? I can’t prove this.  I’m not inclined to identify it as strict “cause and effect,” but I believe this decline in marriage rate relates to two developments over this period:  the increase in incarceration, particularly of men. The overall incarceration rate has increased over four-fold, from 93 inmates per 100,000 in 1950, to 419 today, and the rate among adult men is 10 times higher than women.

 

The other trend is the percentage of adults regularly attending church.  That has declined from a level of about 50% in 1950 to little more than 25% today.  The decline has continued year-to-year.

 

I, of course, am not suggesting that a fully satisfying and rewarding life cannot be lived outside the state of matrimony.  In some cases, being part of a bad marriage is far worse than being single.

 

However, I believe these trends are implicated in the pervasive loneliness and lack of fulfillment so many people feel today.