Marriage and Happiness: 18 Long-Term Studies
What happens to your happiness and satisfaction with your life in the years following a potentially major life event such as getting married or divorced or having a child or becoming unemployed? Social scientists have been doing a lot of research on that question.
What’s Wrong with Most Research on Marriage and Marital Status
More social scientists are beginning to realize what should have been obvious all along – we can’t just compare, say, people who are currently married to people who are not married, at one point in time, to understand the implications of getting married. If the currently-married people differ from the other people – in happiness, for example – we cannot conclude that they are different because they are married.
People who are married and people who are not married may differ in all sorts of other ways...