The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially

Christian Century, Feb 21, 2001 by Don Browning, Kelly Brotzman, David Clairmont

According to the survey, cohabiting men and women made love, on average, one more time per month than married couples. But cohabiting couples are less satisfied with their sex lives: 50 percent of married men and 42 percent of married women find sex physically and emotionally satisfying, while only 39 percent of cohabiting men and 39 percent of cohabiting women do.

The greater wealth of married people may be the most interesting set of statistics. After all, isn't marriage expensive? Isn't it true that many couples say they "can't afford" to get married? And aren't children expensive, robbing couples of the discretionary income that might be spent on fancy vacations or high-yield mutual funds?

Some singles may do better financially, but on the whole married couples accumulate more wealth. They invest in real estate more readily, they save for the future and of course they enjoy economies of scale. "On the day they married, "write Waite and Gallagher, "Cathy made about $25,000 a year and Doug, $34,000. Marriage made them both instantly better off financially. Together they made almost double what each enjoyed previously, but now they only had to pay for one apartment, one utility bill, and they could split the labor needed to care for house and home." It takes only 1.5 times as much money to support two people living together as it would if they lived apart. Knowing this provides an additional temptation to cohabit. But cohabiting couples seldom accumulate wealth in the same way that married couples do. They are far more tentative about their relationship; less inclined to invest together in homes, stocks and furniture; and more likely to do such things as keep separate bank accounts and take separate vacations. On the verge of retirement, the typical married couple has accumulated a total of about $410,000--or $205,000 for each person--as compared to $167,000 for the never married, $154,000 for the divorced, $151,000 for the widowed and just under $96,000 for the separated. Since married households accumulate far more than twice the amount of any other households, something more is happening here than the simple aggregation of individual earnings.

ALL THIS MAY BE TRUE, but isn't marriage really a "hitting license," an institution that sanctions violence by husbands against wives and children? Waite and Gallagher's discussion of the facts and politics of research on domestic violence is one of the most valuable contributions of this important book. It offers crucial insights on this issue that churches desperately need to hear and understand. The impression that the institution of marriage is a hotbed of violence is due to a simple yet profound confusion that runs through the social-science literature and most journalistic reports--the tendency to blur the distinction between marriage and other kinds of living arrangements such as cohabitation, dating and various informal sexual relationships. "Domestic violence is perhaps the only area in which social scientists casually use the term "husband" to mean any or all of the following: the man one is married to, the man one used to be married to, the man one lives with, the man one is merely having sex with, and/or the man one used to have sex with." When these distinctions are made, presently married men are proportionately far less violent than men in other relationships. As Waite and Gallagher pithily put it, "The research clearly shows that, outside of hying thee to a nunnery, the safest place for a woman to be is inside marriage."