Are married happier than singles? Here’s what Gallup found out

Adults who are married report being significantly happier than those in any other relationship status, as per a Gallup poll released on Friday.

“Any way you analyse those data, we see a fairly large and notable advantage to being married in terms of how people evaluate their life,” said poll author Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, according to CNN.

More than 2.5 million American individuals were asked to rank their present life on a scale of zero for the worst and ten for the best between 2009 and 2023. Next, the participants were asked to predict their degree of happiness in five years by the researchers.

According to the survey, a person had to give their current life a score of seven or higher and their expected future a score of eight or higher in order to be classified as thriving.

The data shows that married respondents regularly reported higher levels of satisfaction than single respondents during the survey period, with differences ranging from 12% to 24% depending on the year.

The disparity persisted even when researchers took into account variables including age, race, ethnicity, gender, and education.

Although a graduate degree is a strong indicator of happiness, the data revealed that married adults without a high school education had a more positive life evaluation than single adults with one.

“Things like race and age and gender and education matter. But marriage seems to matter more than those things when it comes to something like this measure of kind of living your best life,” said Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Wilcox reviewed and edited the Gallup Poll research.

“We’re social animals. And as Aristotle said, we are hardwired to connect,” he added.