A Good Marriage Worth $100,000?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 20, 1999

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it," wrote Jane Austen in Mansfield Park.

With apologies to the great novelist, there are other things at work to make us happy in addition to that big income--though for the people wouldn't turn that down. Or at least those are the findings of two contemporary scholars, one American and one British, who have found that a good marriage brings as much happiness to a husband and wife as an additional $100,000 in income.

Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in Great Britain studied 100,000 people during a 25-year period to produce their recently published study, "Well-Being in Britain and the U.S.," according to a dispatch from Reuters.

The duo found the overall level of happiness among Americans has declined in the last quarter-century. During the same period, the happiness level for the English has remained "relatively flat," Blanchflower told Reuters. "Women are happier than men, but that gap is closing. You see, women have equality now and they're less happy than they were," Blanchflower said. He reported that the drop was due to the increased stress that came with greater opportunities. "You're more equal, but life's tougher."

Money can buy happiness, but it is not automatic, Blanchflower maintained. "You have to have a lot of money to compensate you for a family breakdown." When the two academics compared the amount of happiness generated by a lasting marriage to the happiness produced by great wealth or the lack of it, they concluded that a marriage that lasts equals an additional $100,000 in annual income.

Interestingly, the scholars found that most people claimed they were less happy in a second marriage than they had been in the first. Of interest, too, is that they found that for most folks the lowest point in happiness in life occurred around the age of 40. After that, the level of happiness swung upward, back to where it had been in the early years of life.

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