The Happiness Trinity
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.
After writing about how and why Americans are depressed, I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?
The message of W. Bradford Wilcox’s new book is right there in the title: Get Married. “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America,” Wilcox writes. “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” According to survey data from Gallup, matrimony improves every flavor of well-being you can think of. Married couples experience more “enjoyment,” less “worry,” less “sadness,” less “stress,” less “anger,” and much, much less “loneliness.”
Wilcox is not unusual in hailing the salubrious effects of getting hitched. As my colleague Olga Khazan has reported, a recent analysis of General Social Survey data found that Americans’ happiness generally declined from the 1970s to 2020. The author of the paper, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, concluded that, after adjusting for demographics, one thing explained “most of the recent decline in overall happiness”: the decline of marriage.
That would seem dispositive—the definitive answer to my question. But marriage is a lot of things at once. Legally speaking, marriage is a license. Practically speaking, marriage is love, friendship, sex, joint checking accounts, coffee routines, co-parenting, and the sheer fact of another person just being there all the time.
I focused on this last aspect when I recently interviewed Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the director and the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest-running study of adult happiness ever conducted. In their book, The Good Life, Waldinger and Schulz proposed that the most important predictor of lifelong well-being was “social fitness,” their term for the quality of relationships in our lives, across family, friends, and community.
“Most people find that marriage provides that secure base of attachment, that sense of, ‘I’ve got somebody here when I’m in trouble,’” Waldinger told me. “But then what we discovered was that marriage provides all these benefits that are quite mundane, like somebody who gets you to remember to eat, somebody who gets you to remember to go to the doctor, to take your medication. It sounds trivial, except it turns out to really matter for whether you’re happy and whether you stay healthy.”
Social fitness isn’t marriage, exactly—it’s more like the genus under which marriage is the dominant species. Life is an obstacle course of one mess after another, Waldinger and Schulz told me; people need friends and companions to pull them through the Tough Mudder. But platonic relationships often ebb and flow over time, as people change, switch jobs, and move around. There’s no such thing as a legally binding social institution that forces platonic friends to maintain intimacy. But that’s exactly what marriage is (among other things): a legally binding social institution that encourages friends to maintain intimacy.
I’m fond of the analysis and worldview of Wilcox, Peltzman, Waldinger, and Schulz. There is something undeniably warm and comforting about the idea that other people are the core of contentment. But sometimes, I get a nagging suspicion that all this talk about companionship overlooks a crucial pillar of well-being: money.
After all, marriage and several key measures of social fitness rise and fall with income. High-income people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced. And, in part because marriage allows people to combine incomes and avoid redundant expenses, married people tend to be richer in their 50s and 60s, Wilcox reminded me. When it comes to social fitness, several surveys show that people with more money have more social time and are less lonely.
Maybe because high wealth is more exclusionary than marriage or friendship—it’s much easier to get married than to become a millionaire—we delude ourselves about the happiness premium of income. There is a popular idea known as the Easterlin paradox, which says that the correlation between rising incomes and rising well-being suddenly hits a ceiling around $75,000 for an individual, in 2010 dollars. But this theory is almost certainly false—and, indeed, it has been repeatedly falsified. In a 2012 paper, the economists Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers concluded that “data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related.” Rather, the correlation weakens a bit over time, in a way that’s totally intuitive. It feels better to get a $5,000 raise if you’re earning $40,000 as a restaurant server than it does if you’re already earning $10 million as a chief executive.
Last week, I called Gallup’s principal economist, Jonathan Rothwell, and repeated a version of my initial question: What matters most for happiness—marriage, social well-being, or income? Rothwell, to his credit, told me that the question would be incredibly difficult to answer to any level of full satisfaction, but he’d give it a try anyway. A frequent writer on happiness issues, Rothwell defines happiness using a statistical measure called “thriving in well-being,” which combines current life evaluations with future life evaluations. This is because happiness is a slippery thing to define temporally. If I am having a bad day but am generally happy with my life, that’s not misery; if I am having a good week but am miserably depressed about the next five years of my life, that’s not contentment.
After a day or two crunching data, Rothwell got back to me with the results. He told me that his analyses clearly confirmed Wilcox’s theory: Marriage definitely, definitely matters, a lot. It improves well-being in every dimension, for every level of income. Overall, the average marriage-happiness premium was about 18 percent. That is, among all adults aged 30 to 50, about 41 percent of unmarried adults said they were thriving versus nearly 60 percent of married adults.
But when he compared happiness across income levels, another story emerged. Income, he said, plays an enormous role in predicting happiness as well. Low-income adults in Gallup’s survey were mostly unhappy, whether or not they were married. The highest-income adults were mostly quite happy, whether or not they are married. For example, married couples who earn less than $48,000 as a household are as likely to say they’re happy as single adults who earn $48,000 to $60,000, and a married couple who makes $90,000 to $180,000 as a household is almost exactly as likely to say they’re happy as a single person making $180,000 to $240,000.
Finally, Rothwell ran a test to isolate the correlative strength of several factors, including education, religion, marriage, income, and career satisfaction. Marriage was strongly correlated with his measure of happiness, even after accounting for these other factors. But social well-being (Gallup’s proxy for what Waldinger and Schulz call “social fitness”, which includes rating on the quality of marriages and close relationships) was even stronger. Income was stronger still. And financial well-being—that is, having enough money to do what you want to do and feeling satisfied with your standard of living—was the best predictor of Gallup’s definition of thriving.
One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.