How Many Licks Does it Take? // Variant Perception #28

Married fools, wise owls, and the faithful few

Remember Tootsie Pops and those old commercials with the owl?

Now, imagine that Tootsie Pop represents the zeitgeist of modern culture. On the outside is the candy. It’s thin, brittle, and only there to enclose the gooey, delectable inside. The part that the owl always bites through after just a few licks.

That outside layer represents all the cheap thoughts and half-truths that permeate modern culture. It’s where the echo chambers and logical fallacies live.

But underneath, inside the tootsie center, that’s where the immutable truths live. These insights persistently resonate throughout human history, surfacing at times as profound philosophical questions and elsewhere as light-hearted humors.

One of those immutable truths that repeatedly surfaces is humanity's continuous fascination with love and marriage. These themes are at the heart of philosophical discourses and the punchline of many a crude joke. It’s a topic that humans have been arguing about and discussing since, maybe, the birth of our species.

The same tropes that are true today have been true for thousands of years. Aristophanes' play "Lysistrata" debuted in Athens, Greece, two thousand four hundred years ago. The play centers around humorous gender dynamics that would still resonate in a stand-up comedy club today. Lysistrata, the main character, goes on a noble quest to end the Peloponnesian war by enrolling all the Greek women to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers to force them to negotiate peace—a time-honored strategy.

And while stereotypes often reveal societal truths, the stereotype of the unsatisfied wife and the beaten-down husband does not seem to apply.

In a recent study, Sam Peltzman from the University of Chicago analyzed almost 50 years of survey data on happiness.

The most interesting finding to me?

Specifically, married individuals are over 30 points happier than unmarried. This difference is stable over time. It is about the same whether the unmarried state is due to divorce, separation, death of spouse or never having married.

People who are married self-report being far happier than those not married but also happier than the average during this almost 50-year period.

The reason for marriage has evolved over time, especially in the West. Marriage has become more idealistic. Gone are the highly pragmatic partnerships (and much of the cultural baggage and wrongs that went with it).

We now have partnerships built from emotional connection. And, as time has gone on married people have become even happier, compared to a relative stagnation from the unmarried group.

Marriage is just as strong of a predictor of happiness as earning between the 80-100 percentile income levels.

In any snapshot of the population money matters a great deal. The middle of the richest half of the population is over 20 points happier than the middle of the bottom half. However, the Easterlin (1974) paradox lives on: the top income quintile is no happier today than in the 1970s in spite of substantial income growth.

So, with all of this data to support that married people are much happier on average than the unmarried, I find it funny how many memes there are that complain about married life.

That ole ball and chain is actually the source of your deepest happiness!

Now, I’ve certainly felt this in my own life. Most of my closest friends are in “all-in” relationships centered around a more traditional concept of marriage (life-long partnership, family, gender roles, and monogamy). We have life partners who are not only romantic partners but best friends, too. Someone to trust, confide in, laugh with, and build with.

Having a close intimate partner allows for feeling a deep level of trust and security that’s not possible when alone.

As much as we may not like it in the moment, our partners act as a sacred mirror, reflecting back our insecurities, neuroses, and phobias. These mirrors give us easier access to recognizing our blindspots and becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Stick figure cartoon

Creating a successful marriage requires a deep level of commitment. When I married, I immediately felt a new level of depth unlock in my relationship. Something new happened when we made the leap to a lifelong commitment. I felt like my life unlocked a new level of emotional experience.

Then, there’s the faith component. I believe all great relationships require a commitment to practicing faith. I mean faith in both contexts, complete trust as well as spiritual belief. To commit to a lifetime with someone requires feeling faith that your partner, the person who’s also committing to you, will continue to show up when life gets hard. That they’ll be there to lean on and that you’ll be there for them as well.

There’s no better place to test one’s faith than in a marriage. When your partner makes a mistake, you must have faith in their inherent goodness and desire to improve. When your partner has a dream you support them with your faith.

Life can be unpredictable and cruel just as much as it can be boring and compassionate. A couple’s faith in one another creates the map from which to navigate.

And, it just so happens that in this study on happiness, people who have a high level of trust in other people (I’ll happily call this a proxy on one’s ability to access their faith) are much happier than those who do not trust others.

Those with high trust in humanity are just slightly less happy than the married cohort.

Now, here’s the punchline… How much suffering comes from our desire to always have “the best” in a world of always increasing complexity?

Society in 2023 is like having the music on your stereo always turned up to 11. An abundance of choice is now the norm. How much of mofern life is just a repetition of this same conversation over and over, “What do you want to eat for dinner tonight?”

Oh, how about Mexican?

No, we had that last week.

How about Indian?

No, I’m not feeling curry.

Japanese? Nahhh…

Chinese? Ehhhh…

Well, why don’t you pick!

I don’t know. I give up. Let’s just eat cereal.

Rinse and repeat this same scenario four, five, six more times a day when you’re deciding what to watch on Netflix, your plans for the weekend, what you want to wear, and so on and so forth.

Without mincing words, it’s fucking exhausting.

One of the worst offenders has got to be how people choose their romantic partners. Nothing sounds worse to me than the experience of spending hours of my life ‘shopping’ for a date on an app like Bumble. It’s like the examples above but amp up the intensity 100x becuase nothing taps more into that primal part of our minds than mate selection. That’s when our higher, most rational minds lose almost all control.

Except, it didn’t used to be this way. My grandparents “how did you meet” story would shock most young people today. After three dates, my grandma, who was 18 or 19 at the time, told my grandfather, who was 10 years older, that if he wanted to take her on their next date, he would need to propose.

Three dates and straight to marriage. They were practically strangers! Yet, they spent 65 years happily married. They had faith in one another. They were best friends. They loved each other deeply. They committed to working together when things inevitably got hard. They threw the parachutes out when the plane took off, and they clearly did not overcomplicate life with a constant “grass is greener on the other side” narrative which saps so many of their joy.

After reading this study, I come back to the observation that happiness comes from appreciating and finding joy in the mundane moments. Savoring the morning snuggles with my wife. Our silly rituals we do, like chasing each other around the house or making faces at each other across the table.

As life gets more and more complex and complicated, I hold on to this idea. Joy and happiness are found not through constant seeking of “the best” or “the most” but through recognizing contentment inside.

The qualities that make up the idea of love or what makes a great partner have drastically changed. I wonder if, just like beauty standards have evolved to unreachable territories, so have our standards for partnership?

And, as the study said, “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness.”

Don’t get me wrong. Marriage requires a lot of work. It requires an increased ability to compromise. It requires faith, courage, and vulnerability.

And, most of all it requires a settling of that urge to see if the grass is greener on the other side. To be fair, it’s an urge that never goes away. But, what’s important and firmly in our control is the ability to master that impulse.

Maybe, another way to see it is that the ingredients to make a marriage work are also the ingredients that create more happiness in an ever-increasingly complex modern world. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful and ironic twist?

Modern society often leads us to overcomplicate the most fundamental aspects of our lives— including love, partnership, and happiness. We are surrounded by countless choices and inundated with idealized notions of love and marriage, which can sometimes blur our vision of what really matters. But as the data suggests and my grandparents exemplify, a tried and true path to happiness lies in the ability to appreciate simple joys, cherish deep connections, and commit to our choices.

Much like the Tootsie Pop analogy we began with, life may seem layered with complexities and challenges on the outside. Yet, at its core are simple and powerful truths. One of these truths is the undeniable link between marriage and happiness.

So, as we navigate our relationships and grapple with inevitable difficulties and doubts, it helps to remember this: beneath the candy shell of modern influences and distractions, the real essence of our human experience lies in connection, commitment, and faith — the tootsie center of our very existence. Perhaps it's time to relinquish to constant comparing and start savoring the sweet simplicity of this immutable truth.