London - Married couples are happier than those who live together, a major state-funded study has said.
It found that even though husbands and wives have greater doubts than unmarried couples about the quality of their relationships, they are more content than cohabitees.
When asked if they are happy with their lives overall, married couples rate themselves much happier than other couples do.
The Enduring Love? study, produced by the Open University, said mothers were the happiest people of all.
And in general, couples without children were happier than those who were parents. However, married people were happier than unmarried couples, whether or not they had children.
The study, based on surveys of almost 5,000 couples, found marriage was associated with happiness despite the willingness of married couples to admit to flaws in their relationship.
Married couples were more willing than others to admit worrying more about the chores or money than whether they shared the same values.
They were less likely to say they liked to make time for each other, and more likely to say they were drifting apart than that they were entranced with each other’s sense of humour. But nevertheless they said they were happier.
The report said: ‘Both married and unmarried people without children are happier with their partner than parents.’
However, it found: ‘Married parents are as happy with life overall as couples without children and both groups score higher on this measure than their unmarried counterparts.’
The findings echoed results revealed by the Government’s own attempt to measure national happiness and well-being, in which surveys conducted by the Office for National Statistics found that married people are more satisfied with their lives than others.
Married people are, according to overwhelming evidence gathered over many years, generally better off than the unmarried. They enjoy better health and their children do better at school.
But the new wave of academic well-being surveys that try to ‘drill down into embodied lived experience’, as the OU report puts it, are now signalling that marriage is likely to bring greater happiness with it.
The Open University report, which was funded by the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council, said both married parents and childless married couples put their overall happiness at around 4.1 out of five. Unmarried couples, whether parents or childless, scored just over 3.9. - Daily Mail