I went down a research rabbit hole on whether marriage actually makes people happier

So …I went down a research rabbit hole on whether marriage actually makes people happier in the long term, and the answer was way more specific than I expected.

Sharing the studies in case you want to read them yourself.

1) The wedding-peak-then-return-to-baseline finding is from Lucas, Clark, Georgellis & Diener (2003) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
They tracked 24,000+ Germans for 15 years. Happiness goes up before the wedding, peaks around it, and returns to the pre-marriage baseline within roughly 2 years on average. We spend lakhs on the peak. Hilarious if you sit with it.
Link → apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-843527.pdf

2) The best-friend doubling effect comes from Grover & Helliwell (2017), Journal of Happiness Studies. 30,000+ UK people. The ones who said their spouse was their best friend got DOUBLE the happiness benefit from marriage, the boost didn’t fade, and it was even bigger for women. John Helliwell co-founded the World Happiness Report btw, this isn’t a small voice.
Link → nber.org/papers/w20794

3) The divorce-stays-below-baseline finding is Lucas (2005), Psychological Science, “Time Does Not Heal All Wounds.” Followed people up to 18 years post-divorce. On average, life satisfaction stayed below the pre-marriage baseline. This is the AVERAGE …people leaving genuinely bad or abusive marriages are a different story.

Now the Indian context:
Nobody has done this study on Indian bodies. Not at this scale, not with this methodology.what we DO have is Myers, Madathil & Tingle (2005) and a 2012 replication by Regan et al. on Indian-Americans, both comparing arranged vs love marriages and finding NO significant difference in satisfaction. Which suggests the WHO matters more than the HOW.

So no, I’m not pro-marriage or anti-marriage. I’m pro-being-extremely-careful.

#psychology #womenshealth #indiahealth #nutrition #health

Видео I went down a research rabbit hole on whether marriage actually makes people happier канала Ayesha Raje Goyal