Rabu, 30 Mei 2012

Getting married doesn't make you happier

Getting married doesn't make you happier

  • Single people's happiness tends to decline
  • Marriage keeps people stable through life

By Rob Waugh

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Although getting hitched may not deliver the huge 'boost' that many people expect from it, it provides a long-lasting 'protection' against unhappiness, say Michigan State researchers.

Although getting hitched may not deliver the huge 'boost' that many people expect from it, it provides a long-lasting 'protection' against unhappiness, say Michigan State researchers

Getting married does not make you any happier - but being part of a married couple makes you happier in the long run.

Although getting hitched may not deliver the huge 'boost' that many people expect from it, it provides a long-lasting 'protection' against unhappiness.

People who do not get married showed a gradual decline in happiness as the years passed.

But those who had decided to tie the knot remained happy.

Marriage, it seems, might not provide a huge 'burst' of joy, but it keeps people stable throughout their lives.

Their study, in the Journal of Research in Personality, finds that although matrimony does not make people happier than they were when they were single, it appears to protect against normal declines in happiness during adulthood.

‘Our study suggests that people on average are happier than they would have been if they didn’t get married,’ said Stevie C.Y. Yap, a researcher in MSU’s Departmen t of Psychology.
Yap studied the data of thousands of participants in a long-running, national British survey.

They set out to find whether personality helps people adapt to major life events.

The answer, essentially, was no: personality traits such as conscientiousness or neuroticism do not help people deal with losing a job or having a baby.

‘Past research has suggested that personality is important in how people react to important life events,’ Yap said. ‘But we found that there were no consistent effects of personality in how people react and adapt to these major events.’

In general, similar-aged participants who did not get married showed a gradual decline in happiness as the years passed.

Those who were married, however, largely bucked this trend. It’s not that marriage caused their satisfaction level to spike, Yap noted, but instead kept it, at least, stable.

The study is slated to run in the October issue of the peer-reviewed research journal.

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