More than 2.5 million Americans were asked to rate their current life on a scale of zero as the worst.
Married adults report being significantly happier than those in any other marital status, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.
“Any way you look at that data, we see a pretty large and notable advantage of being married in terms of how people evaluate their lives,” said survey author Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup's chief economist, according to cnn.
More than 2.5 million Americans were asked to rate their current life on a scale of zero for the worst and ten for the best between 2009 and 2023. The researchers then asked participants to predict their degree of happiness within of five years.
According to the survey, a person had to give their current life a score of seven or more and their expected future a score of eight or more to be classified as prosperous.
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 such as 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 evaluation of life than single adults with a high school education.
“Things like race, age, gender and education matter. But marriage seems to matter more than those things when it comes to something like this measure of how to live your best life,” said Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Wilcox reviewed and edited the Gallup Poll research.
“We are social animals. And as Aristotle said, we are programmed to connect,” he added.
