NYT Cautions Husbands Against Excessive Happiness

(PHOTO: Ohadweb)

The New York Time’s Economix blog, which reports (rather sassily) about what it calls the science of everyday life, recently linked to an Australian study of happiness and divorce rates in a post entitled Don’t Become Happier Than Your Wife. As someone who had a rather dispiriting 2009 and whose husband is happily ensconced in graduate school right now, doing exactly what he loves doing most, I raised an eyebrow.

Using a meta-analysis of three large sample surveys that include questions about happiness, and correlating this with divorce data, the authors found that “an increase in the happiness gap by 1% raises the probability of separation by 0.24% in Germany (GSOEP), 0.3% in Australia (HILDA) and 0.1% in the United-Kingdom (BHPS).” (This may sound small, but the average risk of breakup in the samples, they claim, is only 1.8% to begin with.)

From the paper itself:

...we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of wellbeing inside couples. Couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavourable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband.

You can read the entire paper here. As for me, when my husband’s experiments don’t go as well as he hopes, maybe I’ll just tell him his frustration is an investment in our long-term future.