Marriage Makes You Happy

A new study confirms what the church has always known to be true

I’m starting a new feature with this essay called “audio voiceover.” Simply click the link at top and instead of reading the essay for yourself, you can listen to me read it. While my Georgia accent may be a challenge for some of you, the convenience may make it worthwhile.

Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published last year the findings of a survey on marriage. While the study will be off-putting to many because of its title—“The Socio Political Demography of Happiness”—it proves something that most of us in the church already knew. The happiest people tend to be those who are married.

This doesn’t mean that single people are unhappy. Many of them are just as happy as married people, whether they choose their state or are single through no choice of their own. Neither does it mean that all married people have happy marriages; the unfortunate truth is that many don’t. But what the study does prove is that for the great majority of people, marriage provides more happiness than any other way of living.

According to Peltzman, the benefit of marriage for happiness is so pronounced that it far outdistances all other criteria:

“Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. … No subsequent population categorization [black vs. white, young vs. old, rich vs. poor, etc] will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.”

Peltzman’s survey came to mind a little while ago as I met with a young husband and dad who wasn’t at all happy in his marriage. In fact, he didn’t see how he could stay married to a woman that in his judgment was making life miserable for both of them. His unhappiness was evident in his voice, his expression, his posture. He slumped in a chair in my office like a weary soldier after a lost battle.

“What do you think is wrong in your marriage?” I asked him.

“Before I tell you,” he said, “I want you to know that my wife is a beautiful woman.”

He paused and gathered his thoughts before going on. “The first time I saw her I thought, Wow! that’s a woman I want to meet. I walked across the room, asked her out and we began dating. A few months later we got married.”

“Sounds like a whirlwind romance,” I said. “What happened between then and now?”

He shrugged. “We had a couple of kids and life got hard. Then it turned out that I just can’t live with her. She’s too much trouble and complains all the time and she’s driving me crazy. I’m not happy.”

“I think I deserve a better wife,” he added in a tone that made my ears perk up. Young men and women who jump into marriage with immature expectations often get into trouble. Many of those kinds of marriages don’t make it.

“So you’re thinking of trading her in like you would a used car?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be harsh but I wanted him to understand how ridiculous he sounded.

The young man didn’t catch my sarcasm. “Something like that,” he said.

“Maybe with your next wife you can find a homely woman who’s easier to get along with,” I said with a smile. I was trying to provoke some sort of response, if nothing more than self-defense.

He stared at the floor and said nothing. So I tried one more time by putting the shoe on the other foot. “Maybe she thinks the same thing about you?”

He still couldn’t—or wouldn’t—listen. He was so focused on his own misery that he couldn’t hear anything I had to say. Our conversation went on like that for thirty minutes or so. When he left, I didn’t have high hopes for his marriage’s survival. But to his credit, I learned later that he had taken some steps toward his wife to try and heal their relationship. I hope he’s successful—for their sake as well for their children.

The troubled young in my office man isn’t alone. As modern American relationships collide with personal irresponsibility, marriages like his get caught in the wreckage. Today, the elegant and simple design of marriage as one man married to one woman for a lifetime has shattered into a thousand different forms, each one more incoherent and painful than the last.

No fault divorce laws—which claim to give more freedom to men and women to escape unhappy marriages—have had in fact the opposite result:

The original intention of relaxing the divorce laws was to allow individuals trapped in bad marriages to exit easily. However, as noble as this objective may have been, demographers' surveys have shown that the number of unhappy marriages has not dwindled; to the contrary, there are far fewer happy marriages. As Maggie Gallagher, the author of "The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love," recently reported in The New York Times, recent studies have linked no-fault divorce with the steep rise in the rate of divorce over the last 25 years. Even the effort to make divorce less bitter failed; Judith Wallerstein's studies indicate that five years after the divorce, 50 percent of all couples were still engaged in conflict.

The practice of couples living together before marriage as a way of trying things out before tying the knot has resulted in more broken hearts and broken promises than I can count as a pastor. According to researcher Scott Stanley, couples who cohabitate before marriage have more negative experiences than couples who don’t:

Those who cohabited before engagement (43.1%) reported lower marital satisfaction, dedication, and confidence as well as more negative communication and greater proneness for divorce than those who waited until marriage before living together (40.5%).

“Serial marriage” is the practice of moving through a series of marriages one after the other. It replaces the biblical teaching of marriage as a covenant with the secular notion of marriage as a contract, giving the illusion that a person is monogamous because they’re with only one person at a time. A more honest appraisal is that serial marriages allow self-centered people to be married until they grow bored or get all they can out of their spouses—personally, sexually, financially—before moving on to another.

The United States Supreme Court’s legalization of homosexual marriage in 2015’s Obergefell decision is another—arguably the most impactful—of all the modern innovations of marriage. Hailed at the time by liberals and progressives as a civil rights victory, the decision delinked marriage—at least, in the public sphere—from its biblical precedents and linked it instead to politics. It’s no accident that since Obergefell, traditional understandings of sexuality have been held up to ridicule and even persecution throughout the nation. A culture can’t adopt a new standard of behavior without first driving out the authority of the old.

There are other, stranger and more twisted ways that marriage is morphing in modern America. Some people are experimenting with forms that include different combinations of men and women in small groups, even including communal style practices that blow up every notion of tradition and reason. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte—no believer himself but an acute observer of modern life—described these novel approaches perfectly: “Where there is no God, everything is permitted.”

In all the arguments, conflicts, changes and innovations in the modern world regarding the place and practice of marriage, one thing stands out. No matter how far removed a particular form of marriage may be from its traditional definition, the argument always comes back to the word itself. “Marriage” carries a weight unlike any other. It’s as though the act is so deeply embedded in the human soul that newer laws and practices can only be understood by reference to the original design.

So why do married people—and by that I mean married in the traditional and biblical fashion that’s served throughout history not just for the enjoyment and prosperity of individuals and their families but also for the stability and prosperity of nations—tend to be happy? What is it about marriage, exactly, that brings joy or at least opens the door to a kind of joy that other relationships don’t give, or give in the same measure?

The answer lies in the origins of marriage as described in the Bible.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them….Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they sall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 1:27; 2:24-25)

According to the Bible, marriage is founded on the differentiation between male and female as a divine act. In Genesis’ famous creation account, we’re told that maleness and femaleness are integral to being human and compliment one another. Marriage is an expression of God’s creative power, bringing Adam and Eve out of their individual destinies into a new, shared life together, to be lived in God’s presence. In other words, marriage carries with it not just a divine mandate but also a sense of divine life. I can’t go past this passage without also pointing out how the notion of transgenderism that’s engulfed modern life is so far removed from biblical truth (as well as modern science if we’re being honest) that there’s no way to reconcile it with historic Christianity.

In the New Testament, Jesus expands the creation account in Genesis to include what he calls a “one flesh” relationship:

“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So the are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Mark 10:6-8)

Marriage, according to Jesus, not only was instituted by divine mandate but also structured according to divine design. In the complimentary relationship between the sexes, God brings about not just a physical union but a spiritual one. “One Flesh,” in Jesus’ words, includes not just body but also heart and soul.

Later in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul adds an even deeper dimension to the marriage relationship when he uses it as a way of understanding Jesus’ relationship with his church:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:25, 31-32)

In other words, marriage images (in greater or lesser degree depending on the maturity of husband and wife) the divine life between Christ and his church.

I admit that it’s hard to get your head around this, but the truth about marriage is so much more than we think—and the reason that Christians must hold firm in their convictions in this modern world that’s hell bent on defining marriage any way it pleases. Every biblical marriage echoes in its inner life of husband and wife the divine life of the Trinity. Just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in a relationship of love between one another, so the relationship between husband, wife and their children (the principle also is true for married couples without children) bears testimony to the same divine life.

I know that’s the last thing in the world you want to think about—or are able to think about—when the baby won’t stop crying and your toddler just dumped his diaper onto the kitchen floor and you and your spouse are at each others’ throats. But grace still is at work even in the worst times of marriage because our marriages aren’t defined by politics, laws, changing moral standards or the chaos of modern American life. They’re instituted by God. For our good and his glory.

All of which leads us back to where I started way back at the beginning of this essay. Why do married couples tend to be happier than others?

Because God is joy. And he gave us marriage as a reflection of himself.

I can’t end this piece without an English nerd quote. At the end of Shakespeare’s play, “Much Ado about Nothing,” the lead male character, Benedick, who through the course of the play has fallen in love with and married Beatrice, advises his commanding officer that marriage is the way to happiness. His words capture the experience of most Christian marriages today:

“Prince, thou art sad, get thee a wife, get thee a wife.”