The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler

Author:Bruce Feiler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Marriage. It’s the foundation for many families. Whether it’s a first marriage, a second marriage, an arranged marriage, a common-law marriage, or just a committed relationship in which to raise children, a partnership between adults is at the heart of most families. Yet it’s among the hardest things to get right in families.

So what’s the latest thinking about the best way to do that?

Marriage has been the subject of a wave of recent scholarship, much of it encouraging. Despite what you may have heard (or felt), marriage is one of life’s most proven routes to happiness. Some of this may be a reverse correlation. As Jonathan Haidt noted in The Happiness Hypothesis, “Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint.”

But as Haidt and others have shown, marriage actually promotes a number of changes that make people happier. Married people smoke and drink less, get fewer colds, sleep more regular hours, and eat more regular meals. (This last fact also has a downside, as married people do get fatter, as anyone who’s attended a high school reunion can attest.) The result of all these health benefits: Married people simply live longer. It’s no wonder that a survey of 59,169 people in forty-two nations determined that married people have greater life satisfaction than nonmarried people.

Marriage is also a far more successful institution than most people think. The oft-quoted statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce is appallingly misleading. Marriage went through enormous changes in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the women’s movement and sexual revolution. The divorce rate for those unlucky enough to get married before those changes set in does appear to be around 50 percent.

But the rate has been plummeting ever since. Divorce is now at a thirty-year low in America, down a third since its peak in 1979. A primary reason is that people have been getting hitched later. The biggest single risk factor for divorce is getting married before you turn twenty-four; the biggest predictor of marital success is graduating from college. In her book For Better, Tara Parker-Pope showed that the ten-year divorce rate for female college graduates married in the 1990s was a mere 16 percent.

All that is a boon to families. The happier people are in their marriages, the happier their families tend to be. But it does raise a high-stakes question: Since marriage is so important to families, how do I get more happiness out of the one I’m in?

Americans have been asking that question for more than a century, ever since marriage shifted from being an institution based primarily on economics and child rearing to one based on personal fulfillment and “finding your soul mate.” The results have been mixed. As Rebecca Davis chronicled in her book More Perfect Unions, the marital enrichment business has gone through many fads, from Freudian analysis to hypnosis to Tantric sex retreats.

Recently many of the traditional routes for marital assistance have come under attack.

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