Myth Of The Happy Single

Watch daytime television long enough, and you are sure to hear the following statistic: Married women, it will be said, are twice (or four times) as likely to be depressed as their unmarried sisters. The implication of the statistic is clear: Marriage is bad for women's mental health.

The claim that marriage is bad for women echoes throughout American popular culture. But it all rests, amazingly enough, on one study published in one journal 35 years ago. In a brilliant new book, journalist Maggie Gallagher and sociologist Linda Waite pick that statistic up with their calipers and expose it to the light of modern research. And guess what? It instantly disintegrates.

The new book is The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially. It is a trove of carefully sifted evidence that shows just what the subtitle says.

The most careful recent study of the mental health of the married and unmarried looked at a nationwide sample of nearly 13,000 people. Married women were about 33 percent more likely than unmarried to rate their emotional health as "excellent." Unmarried women were more than twice as likely to rate their emotional health as "poor."

This result is buttressed by three other major studies that found that (a) while women are in general prone to be more depressed than men, marriage accounts for none of the difference; (b) young women who get married become more happy than while single, and (c) the mental health of single men and women can be shown to deteriorate over time.

So, where does the daytime television number come from? It turns out, as Gallager and Waite show, to rest on a single book, published in 1972 by a feminist sociologist named Jessie Bernard. She in turn got it from a single study published in 1966. And that 1966 study got the results it did because many of the married women in the sample were the mothers of very young children -- a group of women highly prone to depression whether they are married or not.

Normally, a factoid as defective as this would wither under the light of later scrutiny. But Bernard's grim assessment of the impact of marriage on women is repeated across the airwaves because it confirms a deeply held modern-day American prejudice against marriage.

Now obviously not all Americans are prejudiced against marriage. The vast majority of American adults will get married sooner or later, and about 60 percent of them will stay married for the rest of their lives. But elite American opinion is deeply suspicious of marriage -- and oddly, no segment of that elite is more suspicious of marriage than the professionals who study and comment on it.

As Gallagher and Waite note, "The subject guide for the 51st annual conference of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1993 listed 277 topics and subtopics. Not once in all these subjects for conversation did the word 'marriage' appear."

That aversion to marriage may explain the querulous review that Gallagher and Waite received in last weekend's New York Times. In it, Margaret Talbot -- a journalist possibly best known for her 1997 article "The Case Against the Case Against Divorce" -- breezily dismissed Waite's expertise. Since Waite is a tenured professor in the University of Chicago's legendary department of sociology, who has conducted some of the most exhaustive research into marriage ever published, Talbot's nonchalance calls her own intellectual seriousness rather sharply into question.

The Case for Marriage will be for many a discomfiting book. It shatters myths one after another: the myth that kids benefit when quarreling parents divorce, the myth that couples can find happiness by living together, the myth that individuals can find self-fulfillment by living for themselves. Many people have relied on these myths in making major life choices, and they understandably object to being confronted with the truth.

But those unafraid of truth will recognize The Case for Marriage as what it is: the definitive defense of the most fundamental of all social institutions -- at a time when it desperately needs defenders.