Formula of a happy relationship

Erin Brodwin

Thinking about tying the knot? You’re probably wondering if — and how — such a big commitment will impact your relationship. Sure, you may have heard that married people report being happier overall over their lifetimes than single folks, or that people tend to say they’re more “satisfied” with life just after their weddings.

But is it actually the act of marriage that’s causing those benefits? Probably not.

In fact, there’s loads of evidence on the contrary: A 2012 study found that couples who lived together but were not married had higher self-esteem and were happier overall than their counterparts who were married. A 2011 review of the impact of happiness on major life events found that couples who got married generally felt less happy and less satisfied over time than couples who had not. All these negative studies, however, was a recent bright spot in the research which suggests that it isn’t marriage that’s the key to happiness, but the quality of the relationship itself.

A 2014 working paper from the National Bureau of Economics Research found that if the person you call your partner (or significant other, or whatever) is also the person you see as your best friend, you don’t actually need to be married to reap the benefits of a long-term relationship. And it’s this factor, rather than getting married (or not) that appears to matter the most for happiness. For their 2014 paper, the researchers’ initial findings appeared to support the “if marriage, then happiness” idea: They found that couples who were married tended to have higher happiness levels than couples who were not.

However, the second part of that finding threw it out the window: It turned out that the couples who were best friends and lived together were just as happy as couples who were best friends and married. In other words, marriage didn’t appear to matter much at all.

People in a relationship who saw their significant other as their best friend and either lived with that person or married them were happier than couples who saw their best friend as someone outside of the relationship. —The Independent