Americans Love Marriage. But Why?

By John Cloud

Just in time for our annual ritualistic exchange of chocolates for sex on Feb. 14, the New York Times brings this lonely news: 51% OF WOMEN ARE NOW LIVING WITHOUT SPOUSE. The story has been thoroughly blogged, and readers have been dutifully reminded of all the usual statistics suggesting that marriage is threatened in the U.S., an abiding worry of some social commentators at least since the '70s.

But many of those statistics are commonly misread. If you look at the raw data, it's clear that while Americans aren't marrying at the Ozzie and Harriet rates of the 1950s, marriage faces no dire threat today. In fact, we may have come to value marriage too much: there's good evidence that it isn't as beneficial for individuals as pro-marriage conservatives would have you believe.

Let's start with the basic health of the institution: Americans still love matrimony. We spend more than $50 billion a year on weddings. As the National Marriage Project at Rutgers in New Jersey has pointed out, "More than 90% of women have married eventually in every generation for which records exist, going back to the mid-1800s." Even the most extreme predictions for the current generation of women say that at least 4 in 5 will marry. What about all those women not living with a spouse? The Times got to 51% only by including 2.4 million American females over 15 (of the 117 million total) who are married but aren't living with their husbands--but not because the marriage is troubled, according to Robert Bernstein, a press officer with the Census Bureau. Instead, they live in different places because of, say, a temporary work assignment such as military deployment. The paper also counts widows as women living without their husbands. Right. They're dead. Except for the infinitesimal number who killed their spouses, these women didn't give up on matrimony.

What about the oft repeated recent finding that most U.S. households are no longer home to a married couple? That's true, but just barely, and it also has something to do with widowhood. Married-couple households now make up only 49.7% of the total. But roughly 52% of all households are headed by either a married couple or someone who has been widowed. The death of spouses should not be confused with the death of marriage.

Finally, it's true that Americans wait longer than ever to wed. But the rise in marrying age almost exactly mirrors the rise in life expectancy. In 1970 the average American woman could expect to live 74.7 years; by 2003 she could expect to make it to 80.1--a 5 1/2-year difference. Similarly, in 1970 the median age at which women first wed was 20.8; in 2003 it was 25.3--a 4 1/2-year difference. Women are waiting to get married longer at least in part because they are living longer.

Should they feel pressure to wed at all? As Bella DePaulo demonstrates in her (ponderously titled) 2006 book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, the evidence that marriage makes us happy and healthy is quite weak. It's true that currently married people report slightly higher levels of happiness than single people. (In one big study that DePaulo cites, being married was associated with a 0.115-point increase in life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale.) But researchers can't reliably determine which causes which, the marriage or the happiness. Perhaps happy people are simply more prone to take a spouse because they are more sociable; perhaps unhappy people are more prone to stay home and listen to XM rather than date.

Of course, some people end up happier after marrying, but just as many end up sadder. And that's not even accounting for divorce: DePaulo shows that people who marry and then divorce are not as happy as those who stay single. Again, divorce may not cause unhappiness (rather, unhappy people may be more likely to split). But as another study that DePaulo cites concludes, "It is better to have no relationship than to be in a bad relationship."

DePaulo dismantles a few other claims of the pro-marriage lobby. For instance, it's true that currently married people report a better sex life than single people, but men who are divorced and living with a new girlfriend report even better sex. Also, according to a 2004 paper from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, those marrying for the first time tend to report better health--but surprisingly, the period around divorce is also associated with improved health for those breaking up. In short, we feel better when we can pair off and then dissolve those pairings when they go awry. We feel worse, mentally and physically, when we can't find a mate or when we are trapped by a bad one. There's good evidence that it is freedom that makes us healthy and happy, not the bonds of marriage.