Marriage Makes the Nation Happier

News

Marriage is good for your mental health, a new study has found, and divorce is terrible.

Married people in Britain are 2.3 times less likely to be depressed than unmarried people, rising to 2.9 times less likely compared to the divorced, the study in leading journal Nature Human Behaviour discovered.

Questionnaires sent to more than 100,000 people in seven countries revealed that across all the countries, unmarried people are 79% more likely to report depressive symptoms than married people. However, the difference was much larger in Western countries, and in the UK, 6.6% of divorcees said they were depressed compared to just 2% of married people.

The study stands in a long line of research showing that marriage makes people happier, which is just one of many reasons why marriage is good for us.

This is why politicians should be looking for ways to encourage people to get married and stay married, rather than running after the latest ‘progressive’ or LGBT fad.

As journalist Rod Liddle wrote in the Times recently: “a considerable number of our problems are the consequence of the family having been undermined these past 40 or 50 years, to the extent that it has almost evaporated, both as an institution and as an ideal.”

Liddle notes that last year 46% of children were no longer living with both their biological parents by the age of 14.

He claims when “a no-fault divorce can be obtained as easily as a bet on the 2.30 at Chepstow, then marriage suddenly becomes a much less weighty undertaking”.

Promoting marriage is the responsibility of all of us. But political leaders have a crucial part to play in setting law and policy around family relationships. At C4M we call on political leaders to put aside ideology and follow the evidence on marriage. After all, it’s the route to a happier society.