After decades of research on whether marriage causes happiness, and whether married people have better physical and mental health than singles, researchers have concluded that, on average, married people are happier and healthier than singles, yet researchers are still debating the reason behind this, comparing The effect of marriage on men and women.
According to Psychology Today, one of the explanations that married people are happier is that marriage positively affects physical and psychological health;
This is for several reasons, including couples' ability to support each other in ways that friends or family members might not be able to, and just knowing you have someone to lean on can give you the strength and confidence to face the challenges you face throughout your life.
Another explanation is that marriage selects people who are actually healthy and happy. People who are cheerful, stable, and of reasonable appearance have a greater chance of attracting the opposite sex, entering into romantic relationships, and marrying. Likewise, people who are in poor health or who suffer from mental disorders are less fortunate. In marriage, this could explain that married people are generally happier than unmarried people.
Many women marry with unrealistic expectations that lead to disappointment when learning the daily facts of marriage (Shutterstock)
Reason or selection?
And an answer to the question whether marriage causes happiness and health, or whether it chooses the happy and healthy?
Psychologist Charlie Huntington and his colleagues at the University of Denver in the United States conducted a study that followed 168 individuals during the planning stage of their wedding and after marriage, and the results of the study were published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
Huntington and his research team conducted a survey of participants every 4 months for about two years, and each time the participants answered some questions that assessed their general health, their life satisfaction, and the level of stress in their lives in the lead up to the wedding day and the time after it.
Both men and women were similar in terms of their general health changes, as researchers noticed an improvement in the health of couples during the months leading up to the wedding, but it declined after that in the months after the wedding.
These results indicate that couples strive to maintain healthy habits as the wedding day approaches, but they quickly return to old habits after their wedding. The wedding and after, but these effects do not last long.
Men and women are ambivalent in their expectations before and after the wedding (Pixels)
Men are happier than women in marriage
As for the psychological changes, they were more complex, and their results differed between men and women;
In terms of feeling happy and satisfied with life, women's happiness and satisfaction increased before the wedding day, but after marriage this feeling decreased and reached a lower level than it was before the engagement.
This pattern indicates that many women enter into marriage with unrealistic expectations, which leads to their disappointment when learning the daily facts of marriage.
As for men, contrary to what was expected, they witnessed a significant positive change in their mental health after marriage, as their feelings of satisfaction with their lives remained constant during the months leading up to the wedding, but after marriage their satisfaction and happiness increased significantly and significantly, at least during the first few months of their marriage.
This pattern indicates that men benefit from marriage more than they think. In other words, it can be said that men and women are contradictory in their expectations before the wedding and their experiences after the wedding.
The contradiction also appears when looking at the change in the feeling of psychological pressure for women and men;
Women experienced a sharp decrease in the feeling of stress before the wedding, and a sharp increase after that, and in contrast, men experienced a slight increase in their feelings of distress before the wedding, but then they return to their state they were in before the engagement.
Marriage positively affects physical and mental health (Shutterstock)
A happy marriage is built by happy partners
So, according to data collected by Huntington and his colleagues, the answer to the question of whether marriage makes us happy and healthy will likely be "no." They choose to maintain a more healthy behavior during this period.
The data does not indicate that marriage causes happiness, but instead it can be said that marriage chooses the happy, most likely, because health and happiness are attractive features when choosing a life partner, and that a happy and healthy marriage is built by healthy and happy people.
Also, researchers from Michigan State University concluded in a study on the happiness of married, ex-married and single people, conducted on 7,532 people, that true happiness is more related to mentality than marriage. You wear a ring on your finger or not.