After suffering through a long Monday, I sunk into my bed with my laptop.  Virtually leaving the Penn bubble, I began to peruse philly.com, my favorite place for local news.  My eyes scanned the site: Community College strike… Temple Women in NCAA… West Philly Shooting…  None of the headlines seemed particularly interesting.  After all, with an Econ graduate student/sex felon commuting to class from jail and a “screwdriver robber” running wild, our campus has had juicier news lately. 

Suddenly, my eyes hit an article titled “Study: Don’t Get Divorced or Fired.”  Although the statement didn’t strike me as a newsflash, I was hooked.  After clicking the link, I scrolled through the article.  The first sentence read: “When it comes to your long-term happiness, it’s worse to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”  Thanks, Michigan State, for waiting twenty years to tell me.  It’s better late than never — until researchers disprove that too.

Richard Lucas, a psychologist at the university, initially designed the study to evaluate how people react to major life events.  In the field of psychology, it is a commonly-held view that people exhibit an almost constant degree of happiness from the day they are born.  This idea explains variations in the predetermined degree of happiness with “slings and arrows of fortune.”  So, happiness will temporarily increase after positive life experiences and temporarily decrease after negative experiences, but in each case, the level of happiness will inevitably return to normal.  Lucas proved this view wrong. He found that marriage boosted most people’s spirits for an average of two years, but divorce often permanently depressed moods.  Furthermore, divorcees can only regain their innate state of happiness by getting remarried.  A second marriage does not boost happiness levels above normal; the union simply helps people return to normal.  With almost fifty percent of all marriages ending in divorce, I’m shocked that only ten percent of Americans are popping anti-depressants. 

This study has been stuck in my mind since I read it Monday night.  Divorce seems difficult enough: the division of assets, child custody, changing homes.  Now add to the list permanent depression.  Still, while Lucas uses this fact to claim that people often cannot return to their normal level of happiness after major negative life events, I cannot help but feel that he is over-simplifying and making a few too many assumptions. 

Perhaps negative life events are more difficult to recover from because they set off a chain of even more negative events.  Divorce requires paperwork, which requires lawyers, who require money, which increases stress, and so forth in a never-ending cycle.  It may not be that people cannot recover from one negative event, but that these people must continue to deal with new negative events that occur as a result.  Marriage, on the other hand, does not set off a chain of positive events.  The benefits (affection, encouragement, and added financial security) remain constant through the relationship.  So, it makes sense that the increase in happiness from marriage is less permanent.

Additionally, the lack of control many people feel when they learn that their spouses have filed for divorce can perpetuate a sense of depression.  Both spouses must agree on marriage, but only one is needed to end it.  In the Michigan State study, Lucas reports that “he was surprised to find divorce had a more permanent effect than the loss of a spouse to death, from which the average person recovers in seven years.”  How could this be considered a surprising find?  If my husband was going to disappear forever, leaving me stressed and depressed, I would much rather him dead than living happily with some other woman.  Plus, you never have to argue about money or child custody with a deceased spouse.

Lucas’s new evidence contradicts previous surveys showing married people are always happier than single people, and it proves the hazards of heartbreak.  So, who is going to get married in the future?  Will it be the brave?  The stupid?  Lucas found that people who got married “were happier five years before taking their vows.  So it’s not so much that marriage makes you happy… but that happy people are more likely to get married.”  Happy people seem to be the ones who will maintain the tradition of marriage in America.  And in the event of a divorce, they’ll just sink to an average level of happiness — that’s not too awful!