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The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially
by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher
Doubleday, 260 pages, $24.95

The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study
by Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee
Hyperion, 352 pages, $24.95

A few decades past, more than a few Americans entered an experiment with the family with great hope. By releasing sex and domestic relationships from the confines of lifelong, monogamous marriage, they were going to do better for themselves and their children. They could give everyone the promise of greater happiness through hooking up, cohabitation, and divorce. This idea was powered by the rationale that a diversified portfolio of domestic and sexual experiences before marriage would enrich married life.

They further theorized that the freedom to leave an unhappy marriage would create happier, more self-actualized families. Like disco and leisure suits, it seemed like a good idea.

But the passage of three decades and the large participating population have given family scholars a massive sample to study, and they are finding that the experiment was not nearly so rosy.

This idea got its primary momentum from Jessie Bernard and her influential 1972 book, The Future of Marriage. "To be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, a woman must be slightly ill mentally," Bernard wrote, using limited research drawn from questionable data.

Her appraisal meshed with the spirit of the day, and it stuck. Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, and Gallagher, an affiliate scholar at the Manhattan-based Institute for American Values, call it "just plain wrong."

They cite a robust new literature that shows marriage is good for both men and women, markedly better than being single, cohabiting, or getting divorced. Married people have more satisfying sexual lives, both physically and emotionally. They live significantly longer, healthier, happier lives and recover more quickly from illness. They are much less likely to slap, hit, and abuse each other than some have suggested. Marriage protects men and women from suicide and mental illness as well.

"Look at the very new results on emotional well-being based on wonderful data, wonderful measures, and wonderful methods," Waite said in an interview with Christianity Today. "Getting married improved emotional well-being and getting unmarried produced declines in emotional well-being. And it is exactly the same for women as for men."

Further, men and women who are married earn more money than their unmarried counterparts of any category and advance more quickly in their jobs. "[I]t is not tying the knot that limits these things, but cutting the umbilical cord" that harms a woman's earning power, Waite and Gallagher write.

But aren't spouses constantly nagging and harping on one another? Contrary to what you might expect, "nagging can have a powerful impact on one's health for both men and women." They find that people who are lovingly nagged are more inclined to exchange bad habits for good because they have a greater reason, beyond their self-interest, to change behavior.

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February 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 2