I think we should ask ourselves what we hope to find in (or do with) statistical happiness scores across interpersonal relationships. Especially at such a superficial "men vs women" level.
Do we have good data that one demographic is disadvantaged and we trying build a case for societal change in or laws, norms, and customs to correct the imbalance? Awesome!
Are we trying to justify, defend, or promote one decision (marry, stay single, cohabitate) over another? In that case, I say ignore the noise. If you've met one married couple... you've met one married couple. How you'll do in your relationship depends on two things surveys can't answer: you and your partner.
The goal of the state (and the church) in promoting and supporting good marriages has historically and traditionally been to foster stable societies, strong homes, and obviously, population growth and replacement for the aging, infirm and dying.
A society that encourages folks to marry, and to bear children, is a well-functioning society with a bright future. So what happens when marriage is no longer oriented toward child-bearing, marriage is ephemeral and easy to escape, and an increasing number of married people can't even physically conceive children? What happens when children can't count on a mother and father being at home for them, even before their adulthood? What happens when a child reaches maturity without any marriage prospect but must definitely become self-sufficient and enter the workforce, regardless of their sex or abilities, because there's no supportive family structure and they don't even know how to raise a child? What happens when men and women find they've reached adulthood without acquiring skills to run a household, cook and clean and do chores, and it's futile to support a spouse or depend on one, because they'll be divorcing you soon anyway, children or not?
> A society that encourages folks to marry, and to bear children, is a well-functioning society with a bright future
That works in the long term only if you regularly have massive wars, famines and plagues, since Earth can't sustain exponential growth forever. As far as I'm concerned, this fertility crisis is a last-minute bail-out. Having an aging (and slowly decreasing) population is preferable to an overpopulation and ots consequences.
The comment I replied to explicitly mentions "and obviously, population growth" and making many babies is rather typical for the kinds of societies the poster apparently prefers.
> Very, very few women will choose to have more than 2 or 3 kids.
Exactly. The drop in fertility rates is strongly correlated with women emancipation - it's kinda telling how the poster rails against the divorce in several places. They won't say that explicitly, but their way to higher fertility rates is through reducing women's say in the matter. Both directly (outlawing abortion) and indirectly (pushing women into a financially dependent role again).
I think the societies are now undergoing a dramatic shift which results in very low fertility rates. But I believe things will stabilize in several decades / few centuries and the fertility rate will return to ~replacement rate. And as mentioned before, this (IMHO temporary) drop is very much needed at the moment.
The United States leaned so far into support of marriage from both the church and state that we've entirely isolated ourselves into nuclear families and in the process lost the support of the "village". We are raising children in these "strong homes" (fortresses?) as you say and not in strong communities.
You ask what happens when children can't count on a mother and father being at home for them? Well I might also ask what happens when abuse perpetuates because societal pressures make marriage difficult to escape?
Marriage has also been for the joining of two families, not merely two people. For the families to forge an alliance, to increase their mutual support, to pool their resources, to exchange ideas and enjoy fellowship.
So if marriage is impermanent and a private, exclusive agreement between two parties, then they are indeed isolated. Indeed, abuse and infidelity are among the things which can ruin a marriage, whether or not escape is possible. A bad marriage ruins lives. And so does divorce prevent or undo the damage? How often do children benefit from parents' divorces? If a child gains step-parents then that may increase the love, attention, and wealth they receive. If divorce is a solution to abuse, then should the abuser stop trying, or go back "on the market"? Divorce can free abusers from their responsibilities just as it frees the victims, I suppose.
If spouses divorce, what are the ramifications for aging in-laws? Do mature children still have a responsibility to support their parents? Or is this also handed over to commercial and state interests? Put all our elders into a facility, hire a caregiver, that's what insurance is for? A man divorces two wives and he's on a third; who can rely on his support now? Is he capable to stretch his resources among three families or do all his responsibilities cease with divorce? He's certainly gonna get stuck for child support and alimony to the fullest extent of the law, and his custody is sure gonna be imperiled because the courts rule in favor of mothers, and the law supports them so much better.
True, there is plenty of community support for the elderly and I've seen really good programs already (I'm technically a senior citizen here; the threshold is 50)
Are community supports a drop-in replacement for families? Is it the same when Grandpa hops in a commercial van to visit the senior center instead of being dropped off by his son and daughter-in-law? Does a Meals on Wheels participant have the same quality of life as someone whose relative prepares meals for the whole family?
Sure, everyone can survive without their families or friends. You can pretty much hire people to perform any type of service a caregiver could do. The state can fund all those programs and entirely obviate the need for children.
> The goal of the state (and the church) in promoting and supporting good marriages has historically and traditionally been to foster stable societies, strong homes, and obviously, population growth and replacement for the aging, infirm and dying.
The goal for whom? When the benefits of a vast pool of human labor are concentrated to a teeny group of people on top of the pyramid (whether they be kings, aristocrats, bishops, or billionaires), it's not surprising that leaders want to foster "strong societies". Leaders want to foster systems that maintain their power.
But it's appropriate to look at history for cases where this hasn't happened. Many historians argue that the Black Death, while obviously horrible in human terms, lead to a fundamental (and I'd argue beneficial) restructuring of European society. Labor was tight with fewer people, so peasant income went up in real terms. The power of the church went down drastically as people questioned why the church wasn't able to protect them from so much death.
My point is that societies favor systems that maintain existing power structures, but that doesn't mean those power structures are inherently good (or, for that matter, bad).
“Well functioning” for whom? The purpose of the system is what it does. If people are not happy in an entrenched system, it is clearly within their interest to find ways and means to escape said system.
Society has proven it wishes to optimize for metrics somewhat orthogonal to those of the individual, so operate accordingly (treating society adversarially; aggressively affirming reproductive freedoms and the ability to support one’s self without a partner or org driven by a belief system).
(Religions are cults to attempt to enforce conformity and monogamy, while producing as many kids as possible; capitalism ran with this to extract from the cattle in the name of aggregate productivity; it has now started to fall apart with women robustly empowered; 43% of first marriages fail, so avoiding marriage is simply prudent risk management; 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men)
If a 43% failure rate is an unacceptable risk, and ceasing attempts is preferable to failing a second time, what does that say about taking tests in school, filling out job applications, scientific research and advancements, or compiling that code your boss told you to write?
It suggests you are mismatching risk assessments and appetites, either unintentionally through a lack of understanding of the failure scenario, or intentionally in support of a traditionalist belief system.
Marriage has a material cost, love and relationships less so. You can love freely without being bound by the liability marriage encumbers inherently; I encourage others to love, date, and otherwise seek, explore, and maintain romantic and emotional relationships as much as they wish to for as long as they wish to, but from a place of security and with a robust foundation for themselves. You’re putting work in regardless (as most relationships require), but the paperwork making it official ain’t gonna make you any more happy nor does it make the relationship any more “real.” The work and mutual respect is what makes it real. Also, keeping people married who don’t want to be married serves no one.
When something is hard to measure and benchmark (similar to happiness as it relates to success), we default to suboptimal measures instead (such as wealth, power, and status) because it is easier to observe. Important to recognize this and recalibrate accordingly to encourage improved outcomes.
Sure, but I can love best when I have a commitment and a strong sense of responsibility. The object of my affection feels loved when they feel secure and supported, when they can plan for the future without hedging their bets.
I signed a 12-mo lease with my landlady, but they included a clause to let me out easily. Yet, my commitment to them runs deeper than that, and my community ties are strong. I realized how little I would gain by packing up and moving somewhere else, and how much would be lost, not only me but all my neighbors. Why wouldn't I sign a 5-year lease?
All that paperwork we signed does indeed make us happy, because it signifies our commitment to each other, and the regulation and laws that make this a safe and secure living arrangement. Without a lease, I'd be a squatter and the constable shows up. Without the lease, they have no responsibility to fix my appliances or respond to a damage report. The legal technicalities make a lot of difference here!
If a love relationship costs you nothing and has no commitment or responsibilities, then it's worth exactly as much as you paid for it.
Even before reading the article, the inability to quantify happiness led me to assume the result will be garbage in, garbage out, which seems to be the conclusion.
And there’s also the huge confounding variable that people with good financial trajectories are likelier to get married, and it’s been that way for many years.
Yes, these sorts of "studies" that draw insane headline conclusions from horrible data really make me embarrassed to see social science together as a word pairing.
This happens all the time. People take statistical data about a population and then try to apply it to individual members of that population. If 30% of men are less happy in a marriage, that doesn’t mean you’ll be 30% less happy or even that you will have a 30% chance of being less happy. Because you are not an “average man” (no one is).
I'm surprised that none of the studies mentioned in this article (and there were a lot) talk about potential differences by age. I think this is pretty critically important for 2 main reasons:
1. People want different things at different stages of life, and a situation that could be a boon at one stage could be a burden at another. E.g. one hypothesis is that raising kids by a married couple can be exhausting and stressful while single people are going out and having fun, but then once those kids are out of the nest that the married couple is more fulfilled and happy than their single counterparts. Obviously that's a somewhat stereotypical hypothesis - my only point is that life stage matters, and it's possible that married couples may be happier than singles at some life stages but not at others.
2. Age matters because societal attitudes have changed over time. My parents grew up in an era where the expectation was that everyone got married, and if you didn't, something was "wrong" with you. So it's possible that single people from older cohorts really are outliers compared to their peers. As times have changed, societal attitudes have allowed being long-term single to be more of a choice, and especially in countries like Sweden you see marriage as no longer being the "default" option.
I'd like to see a study about this, but age-adjusted. I think marriage pays mainly in the long term. It's easier to report you're better single when you still young, healthy, and socializes a lot outside immediate family. As one ages, the balance probably changes. In the extreme case you risk becoming one of these: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyx6wwp5d5o
I wonder if any differences found by sex are due to age, as it seems men tend to marry older than women, on average.
I could easily see this going the other way. Life long single people develop strong social networks that they keep investing in into old age. Married (and with children especially!) couples invest less time in their social network, in old age they then have many fewer friends when their children leave and their spouse passes.
(I'm not sure this is true or not, but seems plausible. I agree with the author that we should get better data to resolve these questions).
Marriage is sort of like adoption because you're given a new family. It's different from adoption because you get to keep your existing family.
Successful married couples are investing in an internal social network: offspring and extended family. If this network can meet their needs then they have less reason to go outside of it.
Childbearing families are going to encounter other parents and their social network will change accordingly. Play dates, day care, school parents and extracurricular groups will be in their orbit now.
Conversely, single people may rely on their own families for social support, and they may not need to go outside of that, either. Woe betide the single person whose family is unsupportive, because friends and acquaintances are a faint substitute. Such a person could develop ties with their employer, professional orgs, non-profits and community to stay sane and healthy. Or they don't--there are plenty of dysfunctional singles who don't need a marriage in order to suffer and fail at life.
This whole write up seems to fall into the ‘average man’ fallacy, where it is trying to look at the average rate of happiness of men and women in marriages to determine if marriage is on average a good or bad thing.
This seems fatally flawed, because there’s no such thing as an average marriage. There will exist all four of these kinds of (heterosexual) marriage: those where both people are happy, those where neither is happy, those where only the man is happy, and those where only the woman is happy. The distribution is far more interesting than the ‘average’ happiness across all these discrete cases.
Fatally flawed methodology and metrics. What is "happiness"? Did the survey define it or attempt to measure it, or just rely on subjective attestations?
Is happiness really a goal of marriage? I mean, "happily married" is certainly a common phrase, and at least someone who's "happily married" isn't party to abuse, neglect, infidelity, we hope.
But is "happiness" the goal? What about enjoyment of companionship (joy and pleasure are less based in emotion than concrete experience, and less subjective) and what about stability, security, and indeed the other things mentioned there, such as wealth, longevity, and good children -- are those a recipe for the elusive "happiness"?
Our Constitution guarantees the right to the "pursuit of happiness", yet can't guarantee happiness itself. Is the pursuit easier, more enjoyable, more fulfilling than happiness itself? Happiness can be a fleeting emotion. I'd prefer joy and contentment, freedom from suffering, a secure future, instead of the nebulous "happiness", and I'd rather attest to those in a survey than say, I guess I'm happy for now.
Furthermore, how shall we measure the impact of marriage on happiness? We can't exactly do A/B tests with the same subjects. You can't be married and not married at the same time and place. So did marriage increase their happiness, or was it due to aging, experience, childbearing, home ownership? Can science isolate marriage and measure its effects in a vacuum? Can science dissect a marriage to find out how a good one works? Should science work to develop something better than marriage, that's guaranteed to increase happiness or double your money back?
What I got out of this is that this is a very understudied area considering it's hotly debated by everybody and influences a vast section of the population.
Data also appears weak for cohabitation versus marriage, although there is some, and I don't see a distinction in data between one of the key things with children and without which is a whole different ball game.
The characterization of marriage as a prison for the male is likely tied to marriage being aspect of monogamy and the outlawing of polygamy in our society.
Dating app data has shown that women will throw themselves at the top 10% of males. Marriage being an institution that curiously benefits the non-elite of men who would otherwise engage in polygamist marriages to match their often multiple dating partner lifestyle in single life.
It's not because of some great sympathy towards "loser" males that marriage exists: it's for societal stability and for the ye children.
> unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population
Isn't this kind of scary from a sociological and demographic perspective? It would seem to indicate that we've built a socioeconomic system with self-terminating incentives.
I consider myself very liberal/libertarian and individualist vs. collectivist, and I have a daughter, so I'm (angrily) unsympathetic to ideas that even hint at restricting women's freedom on this basis. I'd easily prefer the gradual dissolution of western civilization to my daughter being trapped in an abusive marriage with no right to divorce, being forced to give birth to a child she doesn't want, and so on.
However, all that aside, it does seem like a serious bug in our system. I wonder how we can we flip this statistic without restricting anyone's freedom?
> I'd easily prefer the gradual dissolution of western civilization to my daughter being trapped in an abusive marriage with no right to divorce, being forced to give birth to a child she doesn't want, and so on
the dissolution of western civilization means abuse of women and general disrespect of minorities and individuals as the global norm
It’ll probably solve itself, if there’s any genetic component to the desire for childrearing. If all women have complete choice in the matter, then only the women who do want children will actually pass their genes onto the next generation, and it won’t take very long for the other alleles to be extinct.
What evidence is there that alleles are causing women to not want children?
I would guess watching a video and learning about the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant rearing is capable of convincing someone to not want children.
No idea, I’m just guessing. But I don’t think the number of people who want children after learning about the details is zero, right? There’s still a healthy contingent of the population who see all that and say “yeah but I still want children”.
And I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to assume that desire is driven by genetics… especially because childrearing is so costly and difficult, there’s gotta be some explanation for why people keep doing it, and I don’t think it’s because every woman in history has just had it forced on her non-consensually.
Another way of thinking about: the desire to reproduce (and ensure your offspring survive enough to reproduce) is one of the most basic and important things a genome can code for, and we have billions of years of evolution ensuring that we keep wanting to do it. I don’t think it’s as simple as people just wanting to have sex… the desire for childrearing is a lot more robust than any one thing, or anything you can thwart by just showing someone a video of childbirth. Sure, there are some women who would see the negative sides and decide it’s not for them, but they’re selecting themselves out of future gene pools by doing this, so the system will rapidly reach equilibrium again.
If freedom is equated with the right to withhold and withdraw love* at every opportunity, then perhaps we're not actually free.
* Love in terms of sacrificial, altruistic solicitude for others; love in terms of charity and selflessness; love in terms of bonds of trust and faith; you know, the sort of love that tends to hold families together and help children actualize their potential.
What if your daughter stopped loving you, and cut you out of her life? Is she free to do so?
I mean, perhaps a kid's free to reject their parents, but would their parents be wrong to experience that as trauma and injustice? Would you begin to consider what you've done to lose her, and take steps to reunite? If you love her daughter and give her a free choice, and she abandons you, what went wrong? Parenthood went according to plan?
Can a child be raised to feel no responsibility or commitment to the parents, and just withdraw that love when it's difficult or inconvenient? I love my baseball team when they're winning, but I don't move out of state when they had a bad season.
The parents can experience it however they experience it. That doesn't give them the right to compel another adult human to do anything against their will.
Children don't abandon their parents on a whim. That's not how humans work. If it happens, it's a sign of extreme desperation. It means the decision itself is the tip of the iceberg and the relationship has been severely dysfunctional for years.
Ironically, the kind of parent who would try to force their child to love them or keep in contact with them against the child's will is astronomically more likely to have this problem in the first place. While I can't see the future, it's almost impossible for me to imagine this happening with my daughter. We have a very close relationship to begin with, and I plan to love and support her unconditionally no matter what choices she makes in her life.
Investigate deeper regarding religious marriages vs nonreligious and you will find a vast disparity of contentment leaning towards religious married couples.
We do know boys struggle more from unstable families. Nearly 90% of the homeless and prison population(when accounting for at-home absenteeism) experienced a high degree of absent fathers.
Such a study is inherently observational and very well might be looking at a confounder. Do people who X do better at Y? Or do people who *can* do X do better at Y?
Are married people happier, or are some people who were dealt bad hands in life both unhappy and unable to find someone that would marry them? An awful lot of longevity-related stuff appears to be of this sort.
Do we have good data that one demographic is disadvantaged and we trying build a case for societal change in or laws, norms, and customs to correct the imbalance? Awesome!
Are we trying to justify, defend, or promote one decision (marry, stay single, cohabitate) over another? In that case, I say ignore the noise. If you've met one married couple... you've met one married couple. How you'll do in your relationship depends on two things surveys can't answer: you and your partner.