Does getting married really make you happier?

Nonetheless, some important conclusions can be reached. Getting married significantly increases happiness within a 2-year time frame, and while the effects at the 4-year window are somewhat diminished and no longer statistically significant given the smaller follow-up sample, the estimated coefficient seems broadly similar. The overall effect, an increase of around 0.05 to 0.1 points of happiness on a three-point scale, may seem small, but the average happiness change was just 0.02, and a change of 0.1 points is similar to the effect of a decade of aging. Happiness on a 3-point scale just doesn’t change all that much. The panel model finds larger and more significant effects. In other words, “newlywed” happiness boosts are very clear, but even in the longer run, it seems like being married is associated with a person being happier than before marriage.

Moreover, there are other reasons to think being married might boost happiness. The fact that all models indicate negative effects of divorce and spousal death, sometimes quite significantly so, is striking. If exiting marriage makes people less happy, it stands to reason that being in the marriage was a component of happiness.

While there is some attenuation of effect over time, the central estimate of marriage’s impact on happiness at four years is much larger than was found in, for example, the German data described above. The Taiwanese example found significant happiness effects around 2 years, but noisier effects beyond 3 years, similar to what I find in the GSS, suggesting that marriage in the U.S. has effects more similar to the positive cases of Taiwan and the UK.