Marriage and Happiness: A Survey

Abstract

This paper explores studies concerning the effect of marriage on happiness and reports the followings: Those who marry are happier than those who don’t. There exists bilateral causality between marriage and happiness. Happiness rises with marriage, but thereafter begins to decline shortly. Whether the adaptation is perfect or not is still undetermined. Why people get married? What kind of couples get married and become happy? Becker (1973) proposed a model of household production, and demonstrated that while the division of labor in a household is efficient, husband and wife who have similar traits are often efficient. The latter is known as the assortative mating hypothesis in psychology and sociology and many studies have reported that couples who have similar values and/or personality get married and become happy.