Marriage, Study | featured news

Julia Shaw hit traffic pay dirt earlier this week when she took to Slate to argue that twenty-somethings should follow her lead and get married now. Shaw got married at 23, and it seems to have worked out well for her. Amanda Marcotte responded by throwing some cold hard data on that argument, noting that women who marry later are less likely to get divorced and earn more, on average, than their earlier-marrying counterparts.

Married women prefer their husbands to cook them dinner than have sex, and more than half would choose food over time in bed, an Australian survey has found.

As the number of interracial marriages in the U.S. continues to rise, so does Americans’ acceptance of them, a new Pew Research Center report finds.

“I think you like testing yourself to see how much you can squeeze into a day,” my husband has said to me on more than one occasion. And, on more than one occasion, his hypothesis has added another item to my day’s things-to-do list: argue with husband. Now, I have some empirical evidence that my constant multi-tasking is neither a personal proclivity nor an enjoyable practice.

Loving money may not be good for your love life, according to new research that finds that materialists have unhappier marriages than couples who don't care much about possessions.

As any single person with married friends can testify, their constant patter about how great marriage is for just about everything (Your heart! Your mood! Your life expectancy !) can be a little annoying. Research supports those pitying glances they shoot in your direction when you defend your singleness; long-term committed relationships like marriage really are good for your health. But, still.

As if the vast distributed intelligence of the Internet were seeking to drive home a theme of my last post, I just tripped across this Reuters article relating some findings from the first wave of the UK household longitudinal study. The ambitious government-funded study will follow 40,000 households over 20 years, allowing researchers to tease out how changes in income, health, marital status, educational attainment and so on affect individual well-being over time.  Reporteth Reuters:

Research done in the 1970s claimed that married women were more depressed than single women or married men. Is this still true today? The short answer is, no.