Dating for Single Parents

While we certainly shouldn't go back to the era when men and especially women had no choice but to marry young, maybe it's time to revisit the notion that marriage should wait until all the other parts of your life are figured out. 

If people started looking around for a spouse in their early 20s instead of five or 10 years later, fewer educated women might find themselves on the wrong side of the fertility curve--and women without college diplomas might find it easier to hold off on having children until they were in a long-term, stable relationship.

Some years ago, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist who studies happiness, found himself in an exchange with a reader of his bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness . That book argues, in part, that we are tremendously good at finding ways to be happy with things we can't change. 

(For example, people who have an accident that leaves them disabled report, after a period of adjustment, happiness levels not all that different from what they enjoyed before their accident.)

Perhaps this is the difference between marriage and living together, suggested the reader. Marriage provides lock-in. Marriage isn't just a way of signifying your love; it's a way of creating that love. 

"I thought, that's right!" Gilbert told me, "and I went home and proposed to the woman I had been living with for years." Happily, he reported, his reader was right; he loves her even more now than he did before they got married.

OF COURSE, not everyone wants to get married. But the majority of both men and women do--and with good reason, though they may not understand how right they are.

In fact, the benefits of marriage are so great that it's hard to know where to start. Economically, married couples are far better off than singleton households. In part that's because married men make almost 50 percent more than single ones. 

And that's not just because men with higher salaries are more likely to get married; a study of shotgun weddings (in which the marriage was quickly followed by a birth) showed that even among men who hadn't necessarily been expecting to get married, almost all of this "marriage premium" remained.

Nor are those the only financial benefits of marriage. Marriage allows couples to pool resources and plan for the future, which means they can build wealth faster than single people. It isn't quite true, as the old saw had it, that "two can live as cheaply as one.

" But it certainly is true that one married household is a lot cheaper to operate than two single ones. One kitchen, one bedroom, one living and dining area. One cable and Internet bill. And while you may fight over the thermostat, you'll still be spending half as much on heating and air conditioning.

Two incomes also make it easier to save up for bigger purchases, like the down payment on a house. And they provide a sort of insurance against events like lost jobs. Losing 50 percent of your income is traumatic, but losing 100 percent is catastrophic. 

Even if one partner stays home to raise children, that spouse represents a potential source of income that could be tapped in an emergency. If you're single, well, you're on your own.