Suppose people in pairs are generally happier and satisfied with the single ones; What was not yet clear to us, however, was if the marriage contributed to increasing well -being, or if it were enough “to be together” to be satisfied.
Now a study published on Journal of Personality He answered this question, discovering that marriage and coexistence have little to do with satisfaction for their lives, and that to increase (a lot) our well -being is to start a romantic relationship with someone.
The study. To reach these conclusions, the authors analyzed the data relating to thousands of inhabitants of Germany and the United Kingdom collected respectively between 1984 and 2019 and between 2009 and 2019. From these, they obtained a sample of 1,103 couples without children who had started to live before getting married. Each of the participants reported their life satisfaction for five years, in which the central year was the one in which he had started coexistence.
Wellness at the highest levels. The results show that the couples reached the peak of satisfaction the year in which they went to live for the first time; Compared to two years earlier, when they were single and lived alone, the levels of wellness increased considerably. In the following two years the satisfaction decreased slightly, but it was still maintained at levels of much higher than the period in which the partners lived separately.
The next step was to investigate whether it was truly coexistence to increase the satisfaction for one’s life or not: it emerged that in reality the event associated with a peak of well -being for partners was the formation of the couple, and that with coexistence this well -being remained but did not increase.
And the wedding? In all this, the marriage would have a practically zero role – at least in recent times: for the couples who have married around 1993, in fact, the wedding were associated with a temporary increase in well -being the following year; But in the most recent years this effect was absent, as proof that gradually that the coexistence outside the wedding was accepted by the company The contribution of the wedding to well -being has reduced.
Some limits. The same authors recognize that the study presents some limits, such as the fact that it is based on correlating data (which highlight an association, but do not demonstrate causality) and that therefore the well -being of the partners could be linked to other factors not considered.
In addition, the participants were only German and British, so the results may not be valid in other countries.
