Single Parent and Dating

The benefits of all this on wealth are enormous: on average, people who get married and stay married enjoy almost twice as much wealth as those who never marry. This economic shelter is probably one reason that married couples report being happier than single ones. 

But it's not the only one. Married people are healthier on average, and they live longer. They also report better mental health. And for all those people who say that they'd hate to get married and give up their terrific sex life, married people generally report having more sex and higher levels of satisfaction with their sex life.

While people who marry earlier get less of an income boost, on average, they actually report being happier with their marriages than those who wait.

Of course, there's always the possibility that all of this is just the result of something that social scientists call "selection bias." "The very things that have weakened marriage as a controlling institution that we can use to organize things like having kids have strengthened marriage as a relationship," says historian Stephanie Coontz. 

That is, as the pressure to get married and stay married has declined, the unhappy, unsuccessful, difficult people have all divorced or never married in the first place. 

Work by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers indicates that the introduction of no-fault divorce caused both domestic violence and suicide to fall. If we encouraged those people to marry, the average quality of marriages would fall.

And yet, that doesn't mean that most people would be better off not marrying. If Google hires a new mailroom clerk at $24,000 a year, the average salary of its workers drops slightly. 

But that doesn't mean the clerk would be better off without the job. It's undoubtedly true that the declining pressure to get and stay married has made marriage look better than it used to; the folks who are still married are the ones who really love each other. But that can't explain all the benefits.