The stuff Sciencists come up with..: ''Married People Are Happier People''

It seems it’s not enough in this world to just be happy with Netflix, routinely clean sheets and debatably handsy yoga teachers.

According to researchers John F. Helliwell and Shawn Grover, married people are happier than you and it’s probably because they are together and you are still single.

Specifically, after pre-marital levels of happiness are controlled for, those who tie the knot are more satisfied with their lives than the solo-dolos out there.

Married people are happier than non-married people, or so most of the research on the subject has suggested. But does marriage really make people happier, or are happier people just more likely to get married? This is something social scientists have argued about for some time, and a new review of the literature published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that there really is a causal relationship between marriage and happiness. And the happiest of the happily ever after, conclude authors John F. Helliwell and Shawn Grover, are people who married their best friend. 

Helliwell and Grover used the Gallup World Poll and a pair of nationwide surveys in the U.K. to analyze the link between well-being and marriage, and they found that married people are still more satisfied with their lives than single people after premarital well-being is controlled for. Even as people reach their 40s and 50s, when happiness tends to decrease before picking back up later in life — we know this as the mid-life crisis — marriage seems to have a protective effect.

Helliwell and Grover write:
We find that the married have a less deep U-shape in life satisfaction across age groups than do the unmarried, indicating that marriage may help ease the causes of the mid-life dip in life satisfaction and that the benefits of marriage are unlikely to be short-lived. 

The researchers conclude that friendship between the couple could help explain the apparent causal relationship between marriage and happiness. Using the British Household Panel Survey, they found that for people who say their partner is their best friend, the well-being effects of marriage are doubled, even when controlling for factors like age, gender, income, health, and premarriage life satisfaction. Interestingly, this happiness bump seems to also occur for those who are not married but are living together. 

You know those couples who claim that they are “each other’s armor” during really vulnerable times like third-wheel dinners? Sometimes we want to punch those people, but it turns out they are actually speaking the truth.

In the same study, the happiest of married couples were found to be people who married their best friends.

Furthermore, the researchers concluded that friendship between the spouses helps explain this causal relationships between nuptials and well-being.

Remember when people teased you that you should marry your best friend? Yeah, you should probably make that call now. Turns out, they had your best interests at heart.

You don’t need a piece of paper or a fancy diamond ring to live happily ever after; you need love in your heart and true companionship. At the end of the day, sex is easy to fake, but friendship isn’t.

What’s more? You shouldn’t go searching for your soulmate. Despite what 1,000 Thought Catalog posts tell you, recent research from Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz discovered that framing your relationship in terms of “finding a soulmate” or someone who is “destined” for you is actually really detrimental to your couple satisfaction.

When things get rocky and life’s inevitable obstacles occur, you set yourself up for disappointment as “reality falls short of the fantasy.” Any conflict that arises doesn’t fit the “destiny” mold and subsequently makes you question if this person is really your “soulmate.”

Instead, it’s more beneficial to view your lover as a “partner on your journey,” which sets the more realistic expectation that there will be ups and downs and change in your life together.

When conflict arises, you’re better at accepting this is part of relationships and growing together.

You won’t be so quick to call it quits when you quibble over “Real Housewives” versus “Sports Center” if you view your partner as a person, not a fateful cosmic force.

In the end, regardless if you call yourselves soulmates, lovers, partners, co-captains, spouses, hubbies, BAE, wifeys or The One, what really counts and matters most is that you two are best friends — and will remain that way forever.

Who agrees with them?