Creating a successful marriage is hard work. So it's nice to know you're getting paid for it. That's the word from a researcher at Ohio State University, who found that people who walk down the aisle and stay hitched accumulate nearly twice as much wealth as those who are single or divorced.
Link.
This is a great article. The writer thinks much of the increased wealth comes from simpler tastes: married people are satisfied with each other. There's no need to impress each other with fancy dinners or clothes. Makes sense.
But I tend to prefer the mystical explanations. Here, the mystical explanation might go, "When you do what societal tradition says you should do, you reap the societal benefits."
People are meant to be married and have children for a reason. The reasons range from the practical to the religious, but one thing is fairly certain: solid marriages are good for society. When you live in accord with what's good for society, then society tends to reward you.
Is that proposition questionable? Yup, very much so. For starters, it's full of exceptions: the rich and famous are notorious for marital instability, and every town has married couples who live at the bottom of the economic feeding pole. In addition, there is no such thing as "society." It's an abstraction. To say it "rewards" you is in itself questionable. No one named "Mr. Society" says "Great marriage! Here's $10,000.00."
How, then, does society go about thanking the married couple for contributing to the societal good? How does it get the money into its hands?
That's the stuff for sociologists. I could fill up the entire page with theories and partial explanations, but like I said, I prefer the mystical explanation, and if it's truly mystical, it defies full explanation.
