this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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I sometimes think about how other people have less happy relationships than mine, and that makes me sad for them

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Glad it's worked well for the original OP.

I still remember reading in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" and the research they presented on happiness. Apparently their data averaged out to: 1. baseline happiness when single, 2. big spike up in the first year of marriage, 3. Settles at a permanent level below the baseline (from when single).

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The main problem is that making a happy marriage stay happy takes a lot of daily work. Thankfully my parents showed me how to do that, and more importantly my dad showed me how to make it fun.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago

A lot of couples stop dating after they get married, it seems they just want to go through a checklist

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Your dad sounds wise. Knowledge like that still isn't widespread, and back then even less so. There are no role models teaching/showing/demonstrating this in real life or in media that I have come across.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I have not read the book, but from reading some summaries and commentaries, I got the impression that other people took the message as being different from "marriage makes your life measurably less happy" as the chart implied.

The figure takes on a different meaning, however, when we remember that “How satisfied are you with your life?” is not a simple question. When answering it, people think of significant events in the recent past or near future. People who are recently married or expecting to marry are likely to retrieve that fact, which affects their answer. But those who are not do not think of marriage when answering. The graph could be read as the likelihood that people will think of their marriage when asked about their lives. This demonstrates once again how we are “blind to our blindness”—how we are unaware of the heuristic mistakes that we make. In evaluating this graph, people do not understand that respondents have substituted their answer to how satisfied they are with their life with how easily they can think of happy events in their lives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Does that book mention that married women die earlier?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Which is patently untrue, on average married women live about 2 years longer than unmarried women

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

Well, that depends of which study you look at