Yet more marriage talk

Must be same sex marriage that's making everyone talk about marriage more generally.

Peter Martin writes about its current state in Australia in an interesting article "Getting married is a surprisingly rational thing to do". 

The only I would dispute is that it is all that surprising.

He notes:

People who are married are, on average, happier than those who aren't. Until recently it was thought this might be because happy people got married rather than the other way around. The good news is that a detailed examination of British happiness surveys by two Canadian economists shows pretty clearly that, whether or not happy people get married, they do indeed become more happy after marriage. It had been thought that happiness blast didn't last – that married couples lost the sparkle after two to five years. Married couples do indeed become less happy over time, the researchers find, but that happens to everyone of marriageable age. The important finding is that at every age, married people are on average happier than ones who aren't married.

As for evidence about what makes marriages last, he notes from some research:

They find that what helps most is being similar. Couples who are close in age have less than half the risk of separation as couples where the man is nine or more years older. Couples with different views about whether or not to have children are twice as likely to split. Couples where the man is much better educated than the woman are 70 per cent more likely to split. If one partner smokes and the other doesn't, separation is 75 to 95 per cent more likely. If the woman drinks more than the man, separation is two-thirds more likely.

What each partner brings with them matters too. If they bring low incomes, they are twice as likely to split. If the husband is or becomes unemployed, they are three times as likely to split. If one or both of the partners have divorced parents, they are 60 to 85 per cent more likely to split. If one or both brings with them children from earlier relationships, they are two thirds more likely. Differences in race and religion turn out not to matter at all.

Over at The Conversation, meanwhile, there is some surprising research discussed which indicates this:

Our new data analysis finds parents with daughters are slightly more likely to separate than those with sons, but only during the teenage years. And it’s the strained relationship between parents and their daughters that might bring a couple to the breaking point.

Our working paper studied more than 2 million marriages in The Netherlands over ten years and shows that divorce risks increase with children’s ages until they reach adulthood – with parents of teenage daughters at greater risk. However, this risk disappears in cases where the fathers themselves grew up with a sister.

There's more:

The effect peaks at age 15, when the risk faced by parents with daughters is almost 10% higher than the risk faced by parents with sons. In the following years, the differences narrow again, and they disappear once the child turns 19. A similar pattern is also found among second-born and subsequent children.

Although no causal link could be established from the Dutch data, the higher divorce rates might be explained by strained relationships between young women and their parents.

The increased odds of divorce from teenage daughters aren’t unique to Dutch married couples – we find the same association for Dutch couples in de facto relationships, and for married couples in the US. In fact, we find that both of these groups face considerably higher increases of divorce odds from teenage daughters, compared to Dutch married couples.

I have a teenage son and a younger teenage daughter:  I can tell them tonight over dinner that he's a protective effect on the marriage.   I think she'll find that idea pretty funny.

And as for same sex marriage, I suppose I should note another article at The Conversation that is rather bland and says that same sex marriage makes the same economic sense to the couples as does heterosexual marriage.  No surprise there. 

With this generally positive publicity for marriage, I'm expecting that any day now Jason will be asking Homer to officiate at his.