These are some excerpts from an article on the benefits of marriage which appeared in last week's Time magazine.
Eternal love, the creation of a new family, the approval of society—whatever. What I really wanted to know three years ago before I proposed to Cassandra was, Will marriage make me happier? Little did I know that teams of scientists around the globe were asking themselves the same question, which made me wonder just how easy it is to score a grant. What they have found is that marriage guarantees you almost nothing extra—not health, not happiness. All it really gets you is higher-count bedsheets. And I would sleep on 80-grit sandpaper for a night of bachelorhood.
People have long believed that being unmarried makes people unhappy. Entire Victorian novels, children's card games and phone calls with Jewish moms are built on this assumption. But a long-term study released in 2003 shows that marriage doesn't necessarily make people one bit happier.
That's the conclusion of Richard Lucas, a psychology professor at Michigan State University who dedicated himself to crunching the data from 15 years of interviews of more than 24,000 Germans. Using a complex gauge of happiness that many people know as "Rate yourself from 0 to 10," he discovered that couples upped their scores in the first blush of matrimony. But the ratings quickly subsided to where they were before the wedding.
Before marriage, the study subjects on average rated themselves 7.28. Their happiness then ratcheted up to 7.56 around wedding day. But two years into the marriage, they retreated to 7.28. My wife and I consider ourselves 8.5s but concede that if we were stuck in Germany with some psychologist calling us with annoying questions for 15 years, we would be 7.28.
Marriage, however, does make total losers—the lonely and friendless among us—a little happier, since greater social interaction is one of the few proven ways to increase your life satisfaction. "It's kind of like if you're poor—you can get a lot more out of a million dollars,'' Diener explains. "But marriage isn't going to add as much if you're not lonely." In other words, marriage does the most for socially maladjusted freaks, who wouldn't have any friends or get any action otherwise.
Not only is wedlock unlikely to make me happier, but my health could falter if my relationship does. Psychologists, having previously shown that stressed-out people are more vulnerable to illness, couldn't tell if their hardships were causing the sickness or if the sickness was worsening their stress. So an Ohio State University study rounded up 90 young, happy, healthy, stress-free newlywed couples and decided to ruin their good time. Researchers put couples in a room and had them discuss the core issues they most disagreed about: babies, money, campaign-finance reform. The researchers videotaped them, hooked them to IVs and drew blood at scheduled intervals, both to get firm scientific measurements and, undoubtedly, to stress them out even more.
The only sure benefit of marriage that scientists have been able to prove is that it will lower my odds of committing a violent crime, which really is less a benefit for me than for my potential victims...All this really proves to me is that marriage numbs your desire to do anything.
In a study published last May, psychology professors James McNulty of Ohio State and Benjamin Karney of the University of Florida found that people with the highest expectations for wedded bliss often set themselves up for the steepest declines in happiness. Which only seems fair, because those people are the most annoying.
In a paper released last spring, David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick found that married people have more sex than single people. Why they don't tell you that beforehand, instead of focusing on that honoring and obeying stuff, is beyond me.
So there you have it, scientific facts charting the benefits of marriage, or lack thereof. Save for that fact that I'm not getting any "action," I think I'll maintain my single status for now until I come to the realization that I am a socially maladjusted freak without any friends and marriage is my only hope.
