The Benefits of Marriage

Among those aspects of human existence that improve your mental and emotional health, we find marriage. Get married and stay married-- count, along with aerobic conditioning and socializing-- as treatment for mental health problems.

The research, performed by Brendan Case and Ying Chen at Harvard University suggests that marriage is not just a relic of a patriarchal past. It is a basic human institution, a foundational aspect of all human societies, one that ought not to be scoffed at.

The authors open their Wall Street Journal op-ed:

As anthropologist Joseph Henrich observes, despite important variation in its form across cultures, “marriage represents the keystone institution for most (not all) societies, and may be the most primeval of human institutions.”

The authors researched the benefits of marriage. Is it really better to get and stay married? 

Still, there are good reasons to doubt the benefits of a post-nuptial society, as comparisons of married people either with the never-married or the divorced have generally found that the former are healthier and happier than the latter, even today.

Now, the authors consider the impact of marriage on women. They tell us that marriage works better for males, but they have not studied that cohort directly:

The women who got married in the initial time frame, including those who subsequently divorced, had a 35% lower risk of death for any reason over the follow-up period than those who did not marry in that period. Compared to those who didn’t marry, the married women also had lower risk of cardiovascular disease, less depression and loneliness, were happier and more optimistic, and had a greater sense of purpose and hope.

Of course, divorce is bad for your health:

Among those who were already married at the start of the study, divorce was associated with consistently worse subsequent health and well-being, including greater loneliness and depression, and lower levels of social integration. There was also somewhat less robust evidence that women who divorced had a 19% higher risk of death for any reason over the 25 years of follow-up than those who stayed married. Given how many factors influence health and well-being (genes, diet, exercise, environment, social network, etc.), the fact that marriage could reduce 25-year mortality by more than a third—and that divorce could possibly increase it by nearly a fifth—indicates how important it remains even for modern life.

Of course, these results tend to discredit the feminist critique of marriage as an instrument of patriarchal oppression:

Nonetheless, our study’s focus on women offers important insights in view of the continuing hold of feminist critiques of marriage as an instrument of patriarchal domination. Other things being equal (and of course in particular cases they often aren’t), marriage—with the support, companionship and affection it offers—is still a crucial constituent of a flourishing life for many women.

Of course, the issue of why this should be so remains open. Perhaps people do better when their lives are more stable and better organized. Perhaps they do better when they accept greater responsibility for others. 

At the least, cohabitation does not produce as many positive results as marriage:

… recent research has typically found that unmarried cohabiting couples report less happiness and relationship stability than do married couples.

But then, marriage has gone out of fashion. Fewer and fewer people have been getting married. Perhaps this is good for the manufacturers of psychoactive medication, but it is largely bad for human beings:

In 2021, for instance, the annual marriage rate reached an all-time low of 28 marriages per 1000 unmarried people, down from 76.5 in 1965, a trend driven both by rapid increases in cohabitation and by even steeper rises in individuals living alone. So too, the U.S. leads the world in the percentage of its children growing up in single-parent homes (23% in 2019, compared to, for example, 12% in Germany). All of these trends are concentrated among poor Americans and people of color, who arguably have the most to gain from the safety net offered by marriage.

It is clear, however, that many of us now view marriage not as an essential setting for socializing sex and raising children but rather as a dispensable luxury good.

So, marriage is not dispensable. It is basic to good mental health, not to mention, raising children and socializing sex. At a time when hook-up culture aims at de-socializing sex, we ought to give some thought to the fact that for most of human history sexuality has been socialized through formal institutional commitments.