While I’m sure most guys are smart enough not to make important life decisions based on anecdotal evidence found in a web comment thread, just in honor of reality itself I’m posting some links to actual data about marriage and divorce.
Here’s a good summary of the existing data on the ENORMOUS benefits to both men and women of being married. Generally, married men live longer, have higher salaries, are less susceptible to mental illness, depression, and suicide, report a higher level of happiness, and are more sexually active than unmarried men. And the differentials here are not small, for example:
“Married people live longer and healthier lives. The power of marriage is particularly evident in late middle age. When Linda Waite and a colleague, for example, analyzed mortality differentials in a very large, nationally representative sample, they found an astonishingly large “marriage gap” in longevity: nine out of ten married guys who are alive at 48 will make it to age 65, compared with just six in ten comparable single guys (controlling for race, education, and income). For women, the protective benefits of marriage are also powerful, though not quite as large. Nine out of ten wives alive at age 48 will live to be senior citizens, compared with just eight out of ten divorced and single women.
In fact, according to statisticians Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee, who compiled a catalog of relative mortality risks, “being unmarried is one of the greatest risks that people voluntarily subject themselves to.” Having heart disease, for example, reduces a man’s life expectancy by just under six years, while being unmarried chops almost ten years off a man’s life. This is not just a selection effect: even controlling for initial health status, sick people who are married live longer than their unmarried counterparts. Having a spouse, for example, lowers a cancer patient’s risk of dying from the disease as much as being in an age category ten years younger. A recent study of outcomes for surgical patients found that just being married lowered a patient’s risk of dying in the hospital. For perhaps more obvious reasons, the risk a hospital patient will be discharged to a nursing home was two and a half times greater if the patient was unmarried. Scientists who have studied immune functioning in the laboratory find that happily married couples have better-functioning immune systems. Divorced people, even years after the divorce, show much lower levels of immune function.”
Read the whole thing, as they say. I personally found most of the data here quite surprising.
Of course these benefits only accrue to those who stay married. While the depressing national average divorce statistic is bandied about a lot, it is NOT the case that every married couple faces a 54% chance of getting divorced. The odds of divorce are much higher for some people than for others depending on certain characteristics. You can read an interesting series of blog posts from a pair of sociologists on how things like income, education level, age at marriage, religious affiliation and so forth affect divorce rates (quite dramatically in some instances) here. (This is the last post in the series, I’m linking to it because it seems to be the only page that has links to all of the related posts, in the sidebar).
Why don’t women do anything about divorce laws that treat men unfairly? Maybe because we still have our own problems. Individual outcomes vary, but on average, women post-divorce suffer a 30% decline in standard of living, while men post-divorce suffer only a 10% decline. (Source.) This may be because of the lower earning power of women (particularly for women responsible for child care) in general rather than how marital property was divided, but it may explain why women just don’t see men as being as badly off financially after divorce as they themsleves are.
