Most Couples are Happy

Contra Tove at Wood from Eden

So Tove has a post out on how most couples are unhappy because of sexual incompatibility between men, who are naturally more promiscuous, and women, who are naturally more sexually exclusive. This is a slight simplification, and she goes into much more detail (with graphs!) here:

Most couples just can't be happy

She elaborates on her claim that most couples just can’t be happy by writing,

For humans, being together is really, really hard. There are many different ways of being unhappy together. Many people were genuinely unhappy together in the system before the sexual revolution. Many people are genuinely unhappy now… In any given moment, a certain share of the population forms happy couples. But how many? 30 percent? 50 percent? 70 percent? That depends on definitions. What is clear is that no system for human relationships has yet allowed the vast majority of people to be happy together.

The idea that most couples can’t be happy is definitely unusual, since it claims not only that most couples are not happy in the current environment, but additionally that there are no conditions where most couples will be happy. An introductory check on a search engine implies the opposite:

• Married People Are Among the Happiest People in America, Study Claims

• Married People Are Living Their Best Lives (yes, includes supporting data)

• Are married people happier than those who are not? A new poll has answers (The answers are yes, married people are happier than those who are not)

And if we are interested in knowing the actual percentage of happy couples, it appears to be rather higher than 30%, 50%, or 70%.

For those wanting quick answers, look no further than Eharmony, which reports the percentage of happy couples is 75%. If, like me, you visited the Eharmony page and felt as though you were being talked down to, the Archives of Sexual Behavior has a 2011 study which surveyed 200 couples, aged 40-70, from each of five countries: Brazil, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Relationship happiness and sexual satisfaction were both conveniently coded as binary variables, allowing me to report the findings directly as percentages: 85% of men, and 81% of women reported happiness with their relationship.¹

If you don’t like binary variables, or if, like me, you’re eager to get the highest quality information you can, a 2018 article from the Journal of Happiness Studies had a much larger sample size of 15,385. This study allowed respondents to describe their marriage as “Very happy,” “Pretty happy” and “Not too happy.” After some quick calculations I find that, among married couples in their survey, 62% were very happy, 35% were pretty happy, and 3% were not too happy. So under this methodology we find 97% of couples either pretty happy or very happy, with very happy marriages predominating. If you think marriages that are pretty happy don’t really qualify as happy, I think you’re weird, but OK, 62% is your number.²

Whether you think percentages in the range of 62 to 97 indicate the vast majority of couples are happy depends on how you define “vast majority.” I’d say yes, though that’s the sort of thing the good people at Straight Dope enjoy arguing about. At the very least these numbers don’t match at all the idea that most couples just can’t be happy. The numbers are telling us very directly that most couples really are happy.

How trustworthy are these numbers? The obvious first thought is that maybe we shouldn’t trust the people reporting these results to us. Possibly the people at Eharmony are just making up results—one way or another, they’re trying to sell us on Eharmony, after all. And maybe the 2011 study used sampling techniques that tended to bias the results upward; they were older couples, many of whom had been married for some time, and unhappy couples may have divorced out. But it’s not very easy to dismiss the 2018 study, which took its data from the General Social Survey. Maybe US marriages aren’t representative for marriages in Nepal, but as there aren’t any Sherpas in my subscriber list yet, I’m fine just saying these findings probably generalize across industrialized nations.

What about the question of whether the people answering the survey questions are accurate? Maybe the respondents are lying, or more plausibly, maybe the respondents aren’t really aware of how they truly feel?

How Well Do We Know How We Feel?

I recently ran into a fascinating bit of research that suggests people often don’t know how things are really going for them. Specifically, when people report how much they usually enjoy an event, these reports do not always agree with their actual feelings reported during or soon after the event. In other words, general claims don’t align that well with experiences during actual events.³

A wonderful example of this occurred with me today: I’m recovering from an illness that recently flattened Mrs. Apple Pie. But we’d made an appointment to fix the ignition in our car, which meant that someone had to walk out to pick up the car. When the call came that the car was fixed, it was getting late, the temperature had dropped, and it was raining. My immediate reaction was negative; I wanted to finish this post, my throat was sore, I didn’t want to get any worse. But being A Man, I put on a coat and hurried out without complaint.⁴ And about halfway there, as my shoes soaked through and traffic threatened to run me over, I found myself smiling and laughing. I thought about it for a moment and realized that the scenery was pretty, and I’d been cooped up indoors for days with barely any exercise. So I genuinely enjoyed myself, but if I hadn’t consciously been thinking about it, I may very easily have just forgotten about this and said, “Yeah I had to walk through the rain, but I managed OK.”

So there’s at least an argument to be made that people aren’t perfect reporters of their own happiness. (Here’s a shout out to Sarah Perry who leans so far off the deep end on this one that she says “surveys are bullshit.”) Is there any way we could perform a check on what people are saying about being happily married?

Symptoms of Misery

It’s long been known that married people are healthier and live longer, and these are already markers for happiness, albeit weak ones. What we might really like to see are signs that life is better for married people—maybe, if they are less likely to kill themselves, or have better mental health, or don’t engage in irrational behaviors correlated with miserable feelings,⁵ like heavy drinking or recreational drug use.

A 2007 review⁶ focused on the health and longevity gaps in an effort to determine to what extent they were caused by marriage. Obviously some of these associations might not be caused by marriage at all; for instance, if healthy people get married and stay married more easily, then being single could just be a marker for poor health, and forcing cancer patients to get married in the hospital cafeteria wouldn’t actually improve their lives at all.

From our standpoint, this may not matter that much; what we’re most interested is just the question of whether married people are happy, not whether marriage makes them happy. But the study’s conclusion was that, while some health effects may run in the other direction, strong evidence indicates that marriage reduces heavy drinking and marijuana use among young adults, and improves mental health for both men and women.⁷

As for people killing themselves, well, it also appears that suicide is more likely among the single.⁸⁹

So whether most married people are happy, or just think they are happy, marriage alleviates the third, second, and first most obvious symptoms of misery that I know of. All the evidence of which I am aware points to the conclusion that most marriages really are happy.

1. Heiman, J. R., Long, J. S., Smith, S. N., Fisher, W. A., Sand, M. S., & Rosen, R. C. (2011). Sexual satisfaction and relationship happiness in midlife and older couples in five countries. Archives of sexual behavior, 40, 741-753.

2. Lawrence, E. M., Rogers, R. G., Zajacova, A., & Wadsworth, T. (2019). Marital happiness, marital status, health, and longevity. Journal of Happiness Studies, 20(5), 1539-1561.

3. Schwarz, N., Kahneman, D., Xu, J., Belli, R., Stafford, F., & Alwin, D. (2009). Global and episodic reports of hedonic experience. Using calendar and diary methods in life events research, 157-174.

4. No I wasn’t going to just call a taxi, sheesh, dealing with a little physical hardship is just what you do when you are A Man

5. Settles, R. E., Fischer, S., Cyders, M. A., Combs, J. L., Gunn, R. L., & Smith, G. T. (2012). Negative urgency: a personality predictor of externalizing behavior characterized by neuroticism, low conscientiousness, and disagreeableness. Journal of abnormal psychology, 121(1), 160.

6. Wood, R. G., Avellar, S., & Goesling, B. (2009). The effects of marriage on health: A synthesis of recent research evidence. New York, NY: Nova Science.

7. Ibid.

8. Akbarizadeh, F., Hajivandi, A., Hajivandi, M., & Zeidabadinejad, M. S. (2019). Marriage related suicide fatality rates. Iranian journal of psychiatry, 14(1), 54.

9. Masango, S. M., Rataemane, S. T., & Motojesi, A. A. (2008). Suicide and suicide risk factors: A literature review. South African Family Practice, 50(6), 25-29.