Marriage, Happiness and Priorities

Happiness research is, I think, a dubious field, full of questions about cause vs. effect, about whether you can trust what people say on surveys, about what words like "happy" and "fulfilled" even mean. But to the extent that happiness researchers have discovered anything, it is this: by far and away the most important factor in happiness is your relationships with other people. The most miserable thing is loneliness; the best things are marriage, family, and friends.

David Brooks has spent a lot of time trying to figure out why he, despite a very successful career, is not happier and more fulfilled. This has led him to happiness research, and he recently wrote another column about it. Some of what he heard from researchers:

Economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. . . . As [professor Brad] Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, Get Married: “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.”

Here is something that resonated with me; Brooks says that when he talks to young people,

The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road.

This reminds me of something a good friend of mine once said:

When I was younger I thought my career would be the inside of my life and my family would be the outside, but it is very much the other way around.

So anyway Brooks argued in his column that young people should think less about their careers and more about getting married:

My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy.

And the reason I am writing about this is the comments the Times received on this piece (they collected a sample here) because I think they express ideas that are destructively rampant in our society and explain a lot of why young people are not following this advice. First, there is this nonsense:

Mr. Brooks’s advice that ambitious college graduates prioritize marriage over career could only come from a privileged male.

Yeah, like no mother ever told her daughter to find a husband. This whole habit of interpreting everything anybody says in terms of sex and "privilege" really needs to stop. If there is any kind of advice that is truly global, it is parents telling their children to find a good mate.

But most of the people who disagree with Brooks say something like this:

Finding the right marriage partner is often a matter of luck and serendipity, over which we have little or no control. By contrast, a successful career typically requires constant effort and hard work. . .

This is, I think, how many young people see the world: finding a marriage partner is luck, whereas a career is something you can achieve by your own efforts. I find myself wondering in what senses and to what extent that is true.

I would note first that controlling your career is a middle class fantasy; if some blue collar people had been consulted they could have told this writer that most people do not have careers that are under their own control. Even people who earn good livings in blue-collar professions – construction supervisors, factory foremen, truck drivers – regularly lose their jobs and go through periods when work is scarce and money is very tight. Brooks himself wrote a column several years ago about a factory worker in Kentucky who raised a family while getting and losing half a dozen jobs, only one of which paid what most Americans would consider a good salary. As he said, such a career has a different narrative than, say, pursuing your dreams, something more like "life threw a lot of curveballs at me but I adapted as best I could and fulfilled my responsibilities despite it all."

One of the things driving the intensely negative tone in America is a sense among many people that even middle class careers are not all that secure, and that there is no kind of education you can get that will guarantee you a stable life. Lydia Polgreen:

There was a terrific episode of “The Daily” this week about this sort of rethinking about the value of college, that there was this kind of grand bargain that if you get a four-year degree, you get that college wage premium, and you’re kind of set up for a life that is largely non-precarious. And I think that there’s been a real rethinking of that bargain. . . . You talk to young people, for example, like the podcast producers who worked for me at Gimlet, and they felt like having a college degree in a highly specialized set of skills was no guarantee that they were going to have a secure economic future.

I have written here about the people who got Ph.D.s in demanding areas of science, like microbiology, and still find that they can't have the careers they imagined.

So that's the first thing, that having a good career really is not entirely under your control. I will admit, though, that it is something you can work at in fairly obvious ways, and that the people who work the hardest often go farther and get richer than slackers.

But why is finding a marriage partner a matter of luck?

Consider a story I read several years ago about a woman who decided to find a spouse. She pursued every sort of dating path available, "interviewed" (her word) over a hundred men, dated half a dozen, married the one she liked best, and claimed to be, at the time of writing, happily married. If you're the kind of person who finds that description revolting, trust me, you would have liked the whole essay even less.

But why is that revolting? Given that a "good" marriage is so important to life in our age, why not pursue it with the same kind of determination some people put into the careers? 

We have a sense, or at least I have a sense, and used to believe very strongly, that a good relationship has to start with a romantic spark. Too much systemization and effort, I would posit, is death to romance. There is some data to back this up, too, in the form of studies showing that the best predictor of whether a marriage will last is how much the partners love each other (or say they love each other) at the start. Besides, the wonder stage of romantic love is one of the best things humans can experience, and it would kind of suck to choose a life path that avoids it.

I think the same thing is true for many people about friendship. Everyone agrees that friends are one of the best things you can possibly have in life, but many people would be dubious of any deliberate plan to make a bunch of friends.

There is a sense in which any kind of concerted plan or extended effort is magic-killing. 

But maybe you can fool yourself by using an indirect strategy. Thing one about finding a spouse or making friends is that you can't do either sitting home alone. So the number one piece of advice about seeking connection is to get out and meet people. I met some of my closest friends playing Dungeons and Dragons, and another playing on a club soccer team. This led Scott Siskind to formulate the concept of "micromarriages," that is, every time you engage in an activity that gets you out to where you might a potential mate you earn a few thousandths of a marriage, and eventually they ought to add up to a whole one. (Worked for him.)

At the risk of being horribly anti-romantic, I think any notion that marriage is all luck is just as foolish as a belief that your career is entirely under your control. There are things you can do to raise your chance of success in both, and both can fail due to things that just happen in a world full of imperfect people and a great deal of chaos and pain. 

It seems to me that if you want anything, you should have a plan for getting it rather than throwing up your hands and saying it's all in the hands of fate.