Exploring the Happiness Premium for Ever-Married Men

Is marriage a losing bet for men? The (unmarried), self-described “anti-feminist” Internet commentator H. Pearl Davis has repeatedly argued to her millions of social media followers that marriage doesn’t make sense for men. Her main argument is based on one point: that divorce happens, and divorce has large negative consequences for men. Empirically, her argument is basically that, sure, being married may be good for men’s happiness, but staying married is no guarantee, so the real happiness effect of getting married is not correctly estimated when we look at currently-married men. Implicitly, Davis suggests that the happiness penalty from divorce is so large, and divorce so common, that it eliminates any happiness benefit from marriage. 

On its face, this a reasonable argument—but it is also an empirically testable one. Using the General Social Survey (GSS), I test it and show that, in fact, divorce risks do not eliminate the happiness benefits of marriage. Even accounting for divorce risks, marriage has positive links to men’s happiness.

To begin with, I assess self-reported happiness in 50 years of cross-sectional data from the GSS. This survey asks about happiness on a simple 3-point scale, so doesn’t give us a lot of granularities, but provides a starting point with a large sample size. Figure 1 shows the difference in happiness between ever-married men (even if divorced, widowed, or separated) and never-married men, with and without a battery of control variables. It then shows the difference between divorced and never-married men, among men over 30 (under-30s are excluded because those divorces are quite rare, and most never-married men under 30 end up marrying by their 30s, so they aren’t a good control group).

Ever-married men, included divorced, widowed, and separated men, are about 0.2 points happier. This is true even with controls for lots of demographic variables. So, point blank, Davis is completely wrong: even accounting for the fact that a lot of men get divorced and that divorces may reduce happiness, ever having gotten married is still associated with higher happiness for men. This effect is equal to about 1/3 of a standard deviation in happiness, so is not trivial.

But maybe divorce and separation are so bad that they make divorced and separated men even more miserable than if they had never married. As it turns out, this isn’t so: comparing divorced/separated men to never-married men over 30, there is no significant difference in their happiness, with or without control variables. It’s true that marriage has no lasting happiness effect after a divorce, but after divorce, men’s happiness simply returns to where it would have been had they never married in the first place; they are no worse off.

This data is cross-sectional, but the GSS also has a small panel dataset. Using panel data from 2016 to 2020, I assess how happiness changes among men after they get married for the first time or get divorced/separated. There are only 66 observed first marriages and 41 divorces/separations in the dataset (see Figure 2), so the effects are very noisily estimated and not significantly different from zero, but they do give us a sense of the ballpark of effects.

When men get married for the first time, their happiness tends to rise by about 0.2 points. That’s the same effect we observe for the cross-sectional data, suggesting that the cross-sectional relationship holds up within-individuals, so is likelier to be a causal effect rather than just selection.

When men get divorced or separated, their happiness falls by about 0.25 points. That puts them right back where they were before marriage, on average (it’s about symmetrical in size to the getting-married effect), and so again matches the cross-sectional findings. Yes, divorce makes men less happy: but all it does is return them to pre-marriage happiness levels. There is no net happiness penalty for getting-married-then-divorced in this sample.

On the whole, then, although in theory her argument could have been true, in practice, Davis’ anti-marriage argument for men is completely wrong. Ever-married men are happier even accounting for the prevalence of divorce, men become happier when they marry, and the happiness penalty for divorce simply returns men to their premarital happiness levels without any durable happiness cost. On the whole, getting married and trying hard to stay married seem like a winning bet for men. Thus, while Davis self-identifies as an anti-feminist, her anti-marriage position for men renders her anti-masculine as well.

Lyman Stone is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Chief Information Officer of the population research firm Demographic Intelligence.