Culture,  News

Study Finds More Reasons to Get and Stay Married

From The New York Times:

A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend.

Social scientists have long known that married people tend to be happier, but they debate whether that is because marriage causes happiness or simply because happier people are more likely to get married. The new paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, controlled for pre-marriage happiness levels.

It concluded that being married makes people happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who remain single – particularly during the most stressful periods, like midlife crises…

A quarter of today’s young adults will have never married by 2030, which would be the highest share in modern history, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet both remaining unmarried and divorcing are more common among less-educated, lower-income people. Educated, high-income people still marry at high rates and are less likely to divorce.

Read the rest here.

5 Comments

  • johnhughmorgan3

    Yes, let’s forget about what the Bible says about marriage and singleness and take the advice of The New York Times and opinion polls. Because ultimate happiness and fulfillment in life depends on marriage and sex, right? So Baptist and so . . . predictable.

  • Christiane Smith

    Is personal ‘happiness’ REALLY the ultimate goal we should seek for ourselves within a Christian marriage? Or are we called into Christian marriage for another reason entirely ?
    I give you some food for thought from another time (the Famine, 1800’s) and another place (Ireland):

    “In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people, a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking – they were both walking – north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
    In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

    Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory:
    Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.”
    (Eavan Boland, ‘QUARANTINE’)

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