What’s So Great About Marriage?

Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked thousands of Americans the same question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” In the past few decades, our well-being seemed to take a nosedive. According to researchers, the decline of marriage seems to be the single most important explanation. Why is marriage the best predictor of happiness in America? Does marriage turn unhappy people into happy people? Are happier people just more likely to get married? Or is something more complicated happening? We welcome back Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the director and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development (the longest-running study of adult happiness ever conducted) and the authors of the book The Good Life, to discuss.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

In the following excerpt, Marc Schulz and Robert Waldinger talk with Derek about the recent data on American happiness—and why marriage plays such an important role in it.

Derek Thompson: The headline that we’re discussing here today is that the General Social Survey, which is a gold-standard survey for evaluating changes in American attitudes and behaviors over time, has found that American happiness has generally declined in the last 50 years, with the bulk of that shift happening in the last 20 years, since the turn of the century. I know that the worst thing that anybody can do to kick off a podcast is to talk about methodology. But Marc, in our discussions before this show, you said you wanted to say a few things about the methodology of this paper that we’re discussing, and it is an analysis of GSS data by the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman. In particular, Marc, you said you want to point out that our definitions of happiness—what it means to be happy—have shifted in significant ways in the last 50 years. What do you mean?

Marc Schulz: Yeah. I think there are really two challenges, Derek, and they’re really interesting to think about. One is: When we talk about people reporting about their sense of happiness, we always worry about bias, and it’s particularly challenging. We have a scale, which the GSS uses, that only has three choices. The choices are: You can be very happy, pretty happy, or not happy. Pretty happy to me sounds like what I would say, actually. I feel like I’m happy a good part of the time but not all of the time, and I’m certainly not generally sad. Pretty happy in this survey for the paper that we’re talking about was chosen to be a neutral point, neither happy nor sad. I think when we talk about it, we need to take that into consideration.

Then the bigger point is the one you raised, which is that across time over the last 50 years, our discourse or discussion of what we mean by happy [and] how important it is to us has changed. Talking to people 50 years ago is like talking to a slightly different culture, maybe from abroad, not from the United States, and we need to be careful we’re talking about the same thing. That’s the challenge of happiness research. It’s a challenge for us in our own research as we follow people across eight decades. This is pretty common in this research.

Thompson: Bob, as someone who’s helped to oversee the largest longitudinal study on happiness in American history, what do we need to know about the ways that American attitudes toward happiness or attitudes toward ideas like mental health and well-being have changed in the last few decades? How do we need to foreground that before we dig into the nitty-gritty details of this paper?

Robert Waldinger: It’s hard to characterize because one size never fits all. So yes, there may be some big trends about what people mean by happiness. Certainly in our study, these people of the World War II generation were thinking about how they could have meaningful lives, how they could be good people. We don’t hear as much about that. Does that mean people don’t want that as much? I don’t know, and I don’t know that there’s good research that really can say that there has been a real historical shift. But certainly the idea of wanting a life of meaning and purpose was something that many of the people coming out of World War II were concerned about. Let me just say that, to Marc’s point, even what people mean now when you ask, “Are you happy?,” that varies a lot. At some point, I hope we’ll get into the different flavors of happiness that we know exist from research.

Thompson: Yeah. I think the most important takeaway from this paper and from the data that Peltzman analyzed is marriage. Peltzman writes in his analysis, “Marriage is the single most important differentiator when it comes to happiness.” Continuing with Peltzman: “Arithmetically, most of the overall downturn in happiness is attributable to a decline in marriage after 2000.” I should say, the difference that he’s analyzing here is roughly the same whether you’re comparing married people to those who never got married or got divorced or are now separated or suffered the death of a spouse; it’s a comparison between married and not married.

Bob, I want to go back to you on marriage, because this again is one of those interesting places where there might be some really obvious things to say about what’s so special about marriage, but maybe there are some not-so-obvious things that are important about marriage in terms of being this significant to overall happiness. What are the active ingredients to marriage as it seems to promote well-being?

Waldinger: That’s really important, because if we just say, “Well, married people are happier,” does that mean the marriage license is what makes you happy? No, absolutely not. To your question, what are the active ingredients? Close relationships give us a bunch of different things. Probably one of the most important and most obvious is they give us a sense of intimacy.

We asked people in our original sample, “Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?” Now, having a spouse usually guarantees that there’s somebody you could call in the middle of the night, somebody who has your back. Now, a few of our people didn’t even list their spouses. But most people find that marriage provides that secure base of attachment, that sense of, I’ve got somebody here when I’m in trouble. There’s that. But then what we discovered was that marriage provides all these benefits that are quite mundane, like somebody who gets you to remember to eat, somebody who gets you to remember to go to the doctor, to take your medication. It sounds trivial, except it turns out to really matter for whether you’re happy and whether you stay healthy. There are emotional intimacy aspects that are active ingredients and remembering-to-take-care-of-yourself aspects. Those can be provided without a marriage license. Those can be provided even if you don’t live together with someone. We want to name that rather than allowing people to have the impression that, well, you’ve got to be married in order to be happy.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz
Producer: Devon Manze

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