Happiness Expert Says Women Are Happiest Without A Spouse Or Children

Here’s one for the single ladies – and one which might offer pause for the coupled-up amongst us. Speaking at the Hay Festival on Saturday (May 25th), behavioural scientist Paul Dolan explained how the latest evidence shows that traditional benchmarks of fulfillment for women – i.e., marriage and children – don’t line up with happiness. In fact, Dolan said, ‘the healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children’. Ha! If nothing else, it’s enormously satisfying to hear science undermine that recurring faux-pity wheeled out at the briefest mention of a childless/unmarried woman over, say, 24.

While men tend to benefit from marriage – ‘you earn more money at work, and you live a little longer’ – Dolan supposes that this owes to ‘calm[ing] down a bit, and reducing risk-taking behaviour’. As for your calming, unrisky wife? Well, ‘she, on the other hand, has to put up with that, and dies sooner than if she never married.’ It’s almost as if society has a vested interest in convincing women to devote their lives to men and children at their own expense! Weird.

‘We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.’ Ta, Paul. While other studies have shown that married people are happier on average, Dolan suggests that those findings could be attributed to higher total household incomes as well as the emotional support which comes with coupledom (rather than any objective benefit to the female partner). He also suggested that the stigma associated with single women might, in itself, explain some self-reported dissatisfaction – after all, if everyone’s pouring disdain on your life choices, they do become that much harder to stand by.

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The data comes from Dolan’s latest book, Happy Ever After, which cites research from the American Time Use Survey. As he explained at Hay Festival: ‘Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable’. The ATUS statistics showed that unmarried people report ‘lower levels of misery’ than their married counterparts, when the latter were asked without their spouse looking on. Hey, if you can’t have happiness, aim for ‘lower levels of misery’; viewed from that angle, all kinds of things start to look rosy. As such, I’m not pleased, per se, by Dolan’s findings – just experiencing lower levels of dissatisfaction than I was before I read them.