This new paper goes beyond the findings of other papers that married people are happy, and establishes that marriage itself makes a positive contribution to happiness.

Studies of marriage, mostly conducted in Western, industrial societies, show that those who marry are happy, more social, better educated and have engaging jobs. To show that marriage itself makes a difference to happiness the authors had to construct their study in a way that eliminated these other factors.

Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell
 (of the Vancouver School of Economics) used large scale data sets that measured life satisfaction, and that allowed them to fully allow for influences other than marriage itself.

They found that marriage itself increased life satisfaction, and slightly more for females than males.

“The difference between how people perceive changeable versus unchangeable decisions may be a mechanism to explain the higher well-being of the married” according to the authors. Contrary to orthodox economic theory, which would expect that the ability to change a decision makes a person happier, the permanency of marriage is a factor in making people happy. The paper tells the story of one researcher who proposed to his girlfriend on the basis of his research and reported that “I love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend”.

The life satisfaction of marriage is not a temporary effect, or one that lasts only for a set period, but it persists.

There is a u-shaped dip in most life satisfaction studies, which reflects increased family and work responsibilities in the late twenties and thirties. But Grover and Helliwell found that marriage made this dip in life satisfaction shallower.

Having your wife/husband as your best friend doubles marriage’s effect on life satisfaction. This effect is stronger for women than for men. Grover and Helliwell point out that the results for spouses as best friends parallels studies that show the boost to life satisfaction that religion gives, due to the effect of having church friends.

The authors report that marriage makes people happy in many, but not all countries right around the world.

“We find that marriage is significantly positively related with life evaluations in Western Europe (excluding the United Kingdom), United Kingdom, Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (including Russia), Australia, New Zealand, East Asia, North America and the Middle East & North Africa. Marriage is significantly negatively associated with life evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. Marriage is not significantly associated with life evaluations in Southeast Asia and South Asia.”

And in other good news about marriage it seems Australians are a faithful people.

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships reports that in their 2011-12 survey 96% of people in a relationship expected that they and their partner would not have sex with anyone else. 57% of men and 71% of women said they had discussed this with their partner, and almost everyone (97%) of people who discussed this said they had agreed about it.

These figures have increased since a previous ASHR survey: attitudes towards homosexuality have become more tolerant but the expectation of exclusiveness in relationships has grown.

How’s life at home? New evidence on marriage and the set point for happiness, by Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell, NBER working paper 20794 is available from ssrn.org

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships ashr.edu.au

Image: Mandy Mayberry/ Flickr, used under CC Licence