In 2019, even in the more open-minded cultures, if you reach a certain age and are still single, people would still feel sorry for you, or would think something is wrong with you. One of the happiness buttons is not pushed yet and your life is not complete.
But do you really need to be married to be *happier?
What Studies Say
The most reliable evidence we can possibly have is data from subjective well-being (self-reported life satisfaction). When I took the economics of happiness class as an undergraduate, I was taught that “yes, on average, marriage tends to make people happier”. When we look at how individuals rate their life satisfaction over time (panel data), marriage raises it. When we compare married people with non-married people, they are happier also. When going through mid-life crises, they tend to be less unhappy. Many studies and meta-analysis have been done. So marriage makes your happier. Case closed. Please follow me on Facebook. Bye.
Criticisms
Wait, how good are these conclusions though? The heaviest criticizer I know of is Dr. Bella DePaulo, who have written books about how single people are stigmatized and can be happy too, and a few articles refuting those studies. Some of the criticisms are:
1) Biased data: many studies only look at those who got married and stay married ones and those who stay single. Then of course the married tend to be happier. They did not get divorced. The divorced ones suffered from marriage!
2) Wrong interpretation of the data: e.g. directly comparing the stay-married and the stay-single is problematic as they may be inherently different types of people. Maybe marriage is the inherently the right thing for some. Like dog-lovers could of course be happier after getting dogs. Try giving a dog to a dog-fearer! Or, maybe those happy people would have been that happy too without marriage, because of some inner quality.
(The details are in this article.)
Her criticisms are fair. Some are drawing inaccurate conclusions based on the data. But, at the same time, she seems to be not open-minded enough. Those researchers could possibly had a predisposition, but so as she. Maybe she CAN be perfectly happy as a single, but also maybe marriage is great for many or the majority.
The fact that married couples tend to be happier still seems to hold true, even when the data is not biased. So why?
Why They Are Happier
Turns out, married couples who consider their partners to be best friends are, happier than those who do not. So maybe it is about “friendship”, or the quality of the bond. Marriage is no better than cohabitation, according to this study. It may even be better. So maybe it is about living with the right person. Married couples (and partnered people) also tend to have more sex, compared to singles, which creates lots of joy (this is true statistically and neurobiologically). Plus, as I explained before, sharing resources can be a reason as well.
Why else? I think one highly possible reason was not mentioned by many scholars (like DePaulo): Constantly telling you that you do not have enough makes you feel bad. Constantly telling you that they have that and you do not doubles that. Just like poverty, being poor is not the only bad thing, but also feeling poor, and feeling poorer.
Let us take a step back and look at what marriage really is. Marriage is usually comprised of the following: 1) living with your partner; 2) having sex exclusively with your partner; 3) maybe having kids in the future; 4) registering your partnership with the government, and sharing legal rights and duties. 1 and 2 can be achieved just by having an intimate relationship. 3 is also possible, although could lead to some technical issues. Only 4 is usually hard to be achieved without marriage. And is 4 really a critical component for life satisfaction?
Remember this: this type of studies could only tell you the average of the population. They may give you some insights, but cannot tell YOU whether you would directly benefit from marriage.
Setting aside all the scientific/statistical stuff, in my opinion, relationship happiness is about having someone with whom you can talk about your good/bad day, knowing that you can rely on someone when you need help, sharing certain values, understanding each other, enjoying certain activities together, etc. This is perhaps what many people would call having a soulmate. Romantic relationship does not own a patent for that, but it is usually the producer of that. Let us admit it.
In fact, I would just put out this hypothesis: the happiness/life satisfaction from marriage is actually mostly the result of living with the right person (a great friend as I said above). Oh, maybe it is just about what I was saying all along.
So should you see marriage as one of your major goals in life? Perhaps it is quite clear already that I do not think it is necessary. The point is to have strong, close high-quality bonds with other people. Maybe we can create a sub-culture of pursuing happiness without being committed to a marriage/romantic relationship. Marriage can still be a great things, of course, but we have to be careful with who we pick and when it cannot go right even when try, just quit.
If you think you want to have a family (and if it really would be good for you), then it would be another topic because the law gives married couples much more benefits and convenience for having children. Maybe marriage would really be necessary for you, unless you can change the system.
The barrier to happiness is often us having misprediction about ourselves, and the solution is to observe our own feelings and experiences mindfully. Getting married or not is the question only you can answer.
Phew, this is not an incredibly long article, but behind the text lies a few hours of effort. I had to read a lot of studies/materials (still not enough though) to fact-check myself. Just to offer a little support, please follow me on Facebook or Twitter.
*Just like usual, I am using happiness and life satisfaction interchangeably. Close enough. Don’t hate me.
The Observer Planet 
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