Marriage: Is There a Hitch?

Does marriage make you happy? Or do happy people tend to be the marrying kind? The facts about wedded bliss

By Joel Stein Sunday, Jan. 09, 2005

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    Yet now that I'm married, I need to know how to get the most happiness out of my marriage. And it turns out that I'm well on my way, thanks to my considered indifference. After I proposed, people would constantly ask me whether I was excited about getting married, and I would have to say no. Content, sure. Unconflicted, yes. Even relieved. Unfortunately, these were words that made me seem like less of a romantic than a complete jerk.

    But it turns out that we complete jerks may end up with the best marriages, since we're not expecting all that much. In a study published last May, psychology professors James McNulty of Ohio State and Benjamin Karney of the University of Florida found that people with the highest expectations for wedded bliss often set themselves up for the steepest declines in happiness. Which only seems fair, because those people are the most annoying.

    I figured this out a few years ago while sharing the backseat of a limo with Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, who were ignoring me and making out like 10th-graders on ecstasy. And instead of enjoying the live sex show, all I could think about was whether my marriage, in which I get embarrassed holding hands, was real and true or theirs was. One Jolie divorce and a scientific study later, I know I'm in one beautiful marriage.

    McNulty says people could have longer and happier marriages if they stopped thinking of their partners as perfect. I also deftly avoided this trap. I can get away with saying this because my wife never reads past the second page of anything I write. It's one of her imperfections.

    Although past studies have stressed positive thinking as the key to a happy marriage, it turns out to be effective only in the short term. McNulty's four-year study showed that high goals for happiness--when they're not backed up by equally robust communication and relationship skills--eventually lead to disappointment during the inevitable dark points of a relationship that is designed to dribble on until you die. These couples are like the deluded dumb kids in school who think they can get A's even though they don't have the brainpower to make the grade: they're perpetually disappointed. "But if the student realizes he or she doesn't have quite the skills to get an A and maybe expects to get B's and C's instead, there isn't as much disappointment," says McNulty. "In the same way, it really seems that couples' expectations should match their skills and abilities and the reality of their marriage."

    Negative as these marriage studies are--no increased happiness, possible weakened immunity--they actually haven't made me any less happy to be married. Marriage, for me, wasn't really a choice. I knew that I was never going to leave Cassandra, that I couldn't be any happier. Marriage was just a way to make sure we always remembered that. It was even worth giving up ever having sex with other women again.

    And it turns out, it's going to work out fine for me. In a paper released last spring, David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick found that married people have more sex than single people. Why they don't tell you that beforehand, instead of focusing on that honoring and obeying stuff, is beyond me. --Reported by Sora Song/New York with Elizabeth Coady/ Urbana-Champaign

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