Marriage is a substitute for, not a complement to, other happiness sources.

Evidence

The results here are based on multiple regression analyses on the DDB Needham Life Style sample, including age, gender, education, income, marital status, as well as our various measures of civic engagement. The results are essentially identical for men and women, except that the effects of education and of social connections on happiness are slightly greater among women. Income, education, and social connections all have a greater effect among single people than among married people. For example, the effects of club meetings on the happiness of single people is twice as great as on the happiness of married people. In other words, absent marriage, itself a powerful booster of life contentment, other factors become more important. Conversely, even among the poor, uneducated, and socially isolated, marriage provides a fundamental buffer for contentment. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 2432

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the substitution logic in the diamond-bourse findings — that different trust/control mechanisms stand in for one another. — connects to: Married love has a sui generis essence irreducible to other forms of love
• SEED: An essay angle: which social goods behave as substitutes vs. complements, and what follows for policy when the main buffer (marriage) declines among the very poor.

Broader Connections

• Married love has a sui generis essence irreducible to other forms of love #complicates (0.80)