Marriage and Children Make People Happier Than Work Does

"Marriage and Children Make People Less Happy at Work."  So reads the headline reporting a new study of 10,000 Britons by Kingston University Business School.

The main finding is that when people get married or have kids, they are less happy with their jobs.  This is especially true of women.

Or in other words, getting married and having kids makes people happy, especially women. This tends to make other aspects of life, including work, pale by comparison.

I am not surprised that a business school puts the work effect first.  But I think most people put the family effect first.

Cohabitation Makes It Hard to Break Up, Even When You Should

Scott Stanley, one of the great scholars of marriage vs. cohabitation, reports, as other have, that people who cohabit before marriage are about one-and-a-half times more likely to divorce than are people who do not cohabit before marriage.

At the recent Schreyer Seminar he offered this account of why: cohabitors are more likely to marry someone they would not otherwise marry just because they are already living together.  At a certain point, it becomes easier to marry than to break up.