A new Gallup survey has found that, over more than a decade, one variable has consistently predicted whether people described themselves as” thriving”: marriage. Married people are more likely to be joyful now, predict future happiness, and have a” strong and adoring” relationship with their babies than cohabiting partners.
Gallup classified respondents into one of three groups —” thriving”,” struggling”, or” suffering “—based on how they rated their home lives. According to surveys conducted over the course of 14 years, married couples constantly rated their current life and their potential of delight as better than those who cohabitated separately or were in a committed relationship without living together. The joy difference reached triple digits.
” Within the U. S., it is apparent that married people rate their lives more highly than others and had done so for the past 15 years”, the study, released last Friday,  , concluded. ” From 2009 to 2023, married people aged 25 to 50 were more likely to be thriving—by twin- digit margins—than people who have never married. The 16- percentage- point gap between married adults ( 61 % ) and those who have never married ( 45 % ) in 2023 is within the range of 10 to 24 points recorded since 2009″.
Democracy’s emotional benefit held true” for men and women across all major racial/ethnic organizations” and “is not explained by different demographic characteristics —such as period, race/ethnicity or knowledge”.
According to research from Gallup, married people are less susceptible to communication failures in their interactions. Married couples were only half as likely to ( 46 % ) or be dating exclusively ( 41 % ) say they had experienced two or more days in the past month when they or their partner became so enraged they could not speak to one another. Incidentally, living together outside marriage made individuals 12 % more likely to say than dating specifically while living individually.
Lawfully wedded husbands and wives also experienced greater closeness with their children: 83 % of married couples with children between the ages of three and 19 say they have a” strong and loving” relationship with their kids, compared with 69 % in a domestic partnership, and 61 % in a “non- domestic exclusive relationship”.
Wedding is also linked to another indicator of pleasure: having children. ” Marriage also increases the likelihood of having children and is associated with better relationships with those children”, write Gallup researchers, pointing to the group ‘s , 2023 Familial and Adolescent Health Survey.
Committed parents, and also divorced parents, say they have more affectionate relationships with their own children than those who were not married, the report discovered, in addition to finding that “married parents are significantly , less , likely than divorced or not- married parents to report that their child is usually out of control”.
According to Gallup’s team, ideologically conservative parents reported having better and more harmonious relationships with their children overall than liberal or moderate parents.
The new Gallup research report speculates the likelihood of entering a permanent, lifelong, and ( in Christianity ) unbreakable union must “encourage greater partner selection, as well as greater investments and effort to develop and maintain a high- quality relationship”.
Although married people report higher levels of happiness regardless of their religious beliefs,” [m]arried people are also more likely to practice a religion, and [m ] religious practice is also positively correlated with subjective wellbeing.
Gallup’s research reinforces numerous other studies showing married people, parents, and Christians who actively practice their faith enjoy greater happiness, contentment, and quality of life than unmarried couples, agnostics, atheists, and” Nones”:
- ” Americans who have never married, are not religious, and have lower levels of formal education feel their lives have meaning less often than other Americans do”, according to the November 2023 , American Enterprise Institute ‘s , Survey Center on American Life. Overall, religious Americans generally accept that their lives are meaningful more frequently than nonreligious people.
- Americans who believe in God and value marriage are  , more likely to be “very happy”  , than non- believers and single people, according to a , Wall Street Journal- NORC poll , taken last March.
- Parents” with two children had a risk of suicide 70 % less than their childless peers” , , wrote , Brad Wilcox, director of the , National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia , and a fellow at the , Institute of Family Studies, summarizing a Scandinavian study.
- Americans who attended religious services regularly were 44 % more likely to say they were “very happy” than those who never or rarely attended,  , found , a 2019 Pew Research Center study.
- Christians who read the Bible regularly rated a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index than non- practicing Christians or the religiously unaffiliated, found a American Bible Society , report , last June. When it came to whether they believed their lives had “meaning &, purpose,” active Christians and non-Christians diverged the most.
- A Harvard study found childhood religious activities, such as prayer, paid great dividends later in life, even if the children subsequently left the faith. ” ]P ] eople who attended weekly religious services or practiced daily prayer or meditation in their youth reported greater life satisfaction and positivity in their 20s—and were less likely to subsequently have depressive symptoms, smoke, use illicit drugs, or have a sexually transmitted infection—than people raised with less regular spiritual habits”, according to a , summary , of a , 2018 study  , conducted by researchers from Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
- The” Handbook of Religion and Health” has “reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of” religiosity and subjective well- being, happiness, or life satisfaction, “finding that 79 % of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1 % reported that they were less happy ( the rest found no or mixed findings )” , , reported , Stephen Cranney, a nonresident fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for the Studies of Religion who teaches at The Catholic University of America.  ,
Despite these robust findings, Americans are less likely to , believe , marriage and an active Christian life make people happy.
” The General Social Survey documented a decline between 1988 and 2012 in the percentage of U. S. adults who agreed that married people are generally happier than unmarried people”, Gallup , notes , in Friday’s survey.
Similarly, a Pew Research Center , poll , last September found 71 % of Americans say a fulfilling job makes for a good life, while only 23 % say being married ( and 26 % say having children ) are “extremely important in order for people to live a fulfilling life”.
Instead, culture celebrates the LGBTQ movement, despite the well- attested links between transgenderism/same- sex sexual behavior and poor mental health outcomes:
- ” Female students, LGBQ+ students, and students who had any same- sex partners were more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors”, said a February 2023 , report from the Biden administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teenagers who identified as , LGBTQ were twice as likely to report “poor mental health”  , as those who identified as heterosexual, three times as likely to have” seriously considered attempting suicide” or “made a suicide plan”, and 366.6 % more likely to have attempted suicide, the CDC found.
- ” A higher prevalence of substance use and mental health issues has been well- documented among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual ( also referred to as sexual minorities ) than among those who identify as heterosexual or straight” , , noted a 2023 report from the Biden administration’s U. S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Women who identify as straight were three times as likely as women to use opioids and had sex with bisexual people three times as likely as women to have attempted suicide in the previous year. Bisexual men were , three times as likely , to have had a serious mental illness in the last year, SAMHSA found.
- Two- thirds ( 67 % )  , of Americans who identify as bisexual, and half ( 48 % ) of self- identified gays, said they felt “uncertain about who they were supposed to be” in the last year, as compared to about 1 out of 4 ( 29 % ) of those who identify as straight, the American Enterprise Institute’s survey found.
The Washington Stand was the publication that was first.
