{"id":1890,"date":"2023-09-20T15:10:25","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T15:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/20\/is-marriage-the-ultimate-key-to-long-term-happiness\/"},"modified":"2023-09-20T15:10:25","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T15:10:25","slug":"is-marriage-the-ultimate-key-to-long-term-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/20\/is-marriage-the-ultimate-key-to-long-term-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Marriage the Ultimate Key to Long-Term Happiness?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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If all there was to go on were sitcoms, movies, and mainstream editorials, we\u2019d have to conclude that marriage is a direct path to misery, the \u201cold ball and chain\u201d that only ties us down, limits our freedom, and cramps our sexual fun. Many people now think of marriage less as \u201csettling down\u201d and more as \u201csettling.\u201d Young people are told, \u201cYou\u2019ve got plenty of time, live a little, first,\u201d as if life ends after the wedding.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The truth about marriage, however, is that it is, statistically, the single best predictor of long-term happiness. Making this even more important to understand is that for at least the last 20 years now, Americans have been steadily getting\u00a0less\u00a0<\/em>happy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Writing at\u00a0UnHerd<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>sociologist Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies\u2019 David Bass point to\u00a0new research from the University of Chicago<\/a> that\u00a0suggests that\u00a0\u201cAmericans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless.\u201d And not just a little bit happier, either.\u00a0 According to\u00a0Wilcox and Bass\u00a0there is\u00a0a \u201cstartling 30-percentage-point happiness divide between married and unmarried Americans.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words, the happiness divide and the marriage divide are largely the same. Sam Peltzman, lead researcher behind the University of Chicago paper, isolated all other factors among thousands of respondents, including income, education, race, location, age, and gender. He concluded that \u201cthe most important differentiator\u201d when it comes to who is happy and who is not is marriage. \u201cLow happiness characterizes all types of non-married,\u201d Peltzman writes, whether divorced, widowed, or never married. \u201cNo subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words, the decline of marriage over the last several decades is\u00a0causing\u00a0<\/em>the decline in happiness, or at least most of it.\u00a0As Peltzman told\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in statistical hyperbole: \u201cThe only happy people for 50 years have been married people.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Olga Khazan, who wrote the\u00a0Atlantic\u00a0<\/em>piece and has been cohabiting with her partner for 15 years, says these stats also struck her as counterintuitive. However, she then admits that \u201cthis is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, happiness isn\u2019t the sole or even the best reason to get married. Many things in life carry deep meaning and significance that don\u2019t necessarily make us happy. A life lived only for happiness is a futile \u201cchasing after the wind.\u201d Enduring suffering, overcoming trials and tragedy, or sacrificing time, energy,\u00a0or even our lives for others are all richly worthwhile pursuits that yield rewards in eternity. Certainly, loving someone and raising godly children is worth it, even if it\u2019s not always fun.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

And\u00a0we should note, \u201chappiness\u201d is a malleable word. When survey participants say being married or having children made them \u201chappy,\u201d they may often mean that these permanent connections give them lasting\u00a0joy,\u00a0<\/em>something more profound than fleeting happiness, which surveys seldom quantify.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, these consistently stark results are unmistakable. They should challenge the entire way of thinking in sitcoms, movies, and editorials. Marriage is one of the chief sources of well-being and satisfaction in life. The fact that marriage rates have declined so dramatically over the last 50 years has had real, population-wide consequences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because the reasons people are not marrying at the same rates are so complex, different solutions will be required to raise the marriage rate. According to Wilcox and Bass, one of the most important reasons is the fact that,\u00a0for many Americans who are living together and may already have children, getting married incurs a tax \u201cpenalty.\u201d The federal government needs to, in their words, stop \u201cmaking marriage a bad financial bet for lower-income families.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That would be a good start. Ultimately,\u00a0however, our bad laws are reinforced by a low view of marriage that has infected hearts and minds via entertainment, media, culture, and individual choices.\u00a0We have\u00a0a worldview problem, which has led to a conflict between the values and priorities of millions of people and the way they were actually created to live.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Marriage is part of God\u2019s plan for humanity and for His creation. No other human institution forges such lasting and consequential bonds. So, it should surprise no one \u2014 least of all Christians \u2014 that our nation\u2019s 50 \u2014 year experiment with alternatives to marriage has left huge numbers of people deeply unhappy. Thanks to social science, we know the solution. The question now, for each of us and for all of society, is whether we\u2019re willing to commit.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Originally published at BreakPoint.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He\u2019s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.\u00a0\u00a0
Shane Morris\u00a0is a senior writer at the Colson Center, where he has been the resident Calvinist and millennial, home-school grad since 2010, and an intern under Chuck Colson. He writes BreakPoint commentaries and columns. Shane has also written for\u00a0The Federalist,\u00a0The Christian Post, and Summit Ministries, and he blogs regularly for Patheos Evangelical as Troubler of Israel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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iStock\/Dmitriy Fesenko If all there was to go on were sitcoms, movies, and mainstream editorials, we\u2019d have to conclude that marriage is a direct path to misery, the \u201cold ball and chain\u201d that only ties us down, limits our freedom, and cramps our sexual fun. Many people now think of marriage less as \u201csettling down\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1891,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}