The Marriage Effect

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When I was deciding whether to have children, in the early 2000s, most of what I read about the prospect was negative. Articles detailed the sleep deprivation, the physical challenges of pregnancy, the sheer overwhelmingness of motherhood. If you want to be happy, these writers warned, don’t have children. You might not want to get married, either—after all, marriage, research suggested, mostly benefits men.

Friends and family had few positive things to say, especially about parenting. When I asked parents I knew about the disadvantages of having children, I got an earful about tantrums, child-care difficulties, and the lack of time to yourself. “You don’t sleep for 18 years,” one cousin confided. When I would ask about advantages, there was usually a long, awkward pause. “It makes you less selfish,” one aunt offered—not a convincing argument for a fiercely independent, career-minded woman such as myself.

These same sentiments are prevalent in today’s online conversations and news reports. “Women Are Happier Without Children or a Spouse, Says Happiness Expert,” one headline reads. Another reveals “Why So Many Single Women Without Children Are Happy.” People post in discussion forums, asking, “Why do you think that single unmarried women without children are happier than married women with children?”

But are married mothers actually less happy than single women without children? That’s one of the questions that, along with my colleagues Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang, and Brad Wilcox, I set out to answer by conducting a nationally representative survey of 3,000 American women ages 25 to 55, fielded by YouGov in March 2025.

Read: Enough with the mom guilt already

What we found contradicts the negative messages that I had come across: Married mothers are actually happier than unmarried women and married women without children. In the survey, 19 percent of married mothers described themselves as “very happy,” compared with 11 percent of married women without children, 13 percent of unmarried mothers, and 10 percent of unmarried women without children. Married mothers were also more likely to say that life is enjoyable most or all of the time than the other three groups. These numbers are controlled for age, family income, and education, so we know that those factors aren’t the cause of the differences.

These findings are not a one-off. Well-respected sources, such as the General Social Survey, show the same result; married mothers and fathers in that survey were more likely to report being “very happy” than unmarried people and those without children. Another recent study found that married or partnered mothers are less likely to frequently feel depressed or anxious than people in the other three groups.

Could it be not that marriage produces happiness, but that the causation goes the other way—that happier people are more likely to marry? One study controlled for premarital happiness levels and still found that marriage results in happier people and a less intense dip in life satisfaction at middle age.

That’s not to say the roles of wife and mother don’t have their challenges. Roughly two-thirds of mothers in our survey, for example, said that they felt overwhelmed each day (though so did more than half of nonmothers). About six in 10 mothers said that they wished they had more time to themselves, compared with about four out of 10 childless women.

Why, then, are mothers happier? The reasons speak to the profound experience of parenthood. Married mothers were the most likely to agree that their life “has a clear sense of purpose” (28 percent), followed closely by unmarried mothers (25 percent). Only approximately 15 percent of women without children agreed. Mothers were also more likely than nonmothers to agree that their life “feels meaningful” all or most of the time.

I now have three children, and I am somewhat incredulous that in my premotherhood inquiries, no one mentioned the sense of purpose parenthood gives you. Yes, you’re going to be tired and overwhelmed, but there’s a deep knowledge that you’re doing something important with your life: You’re nurturing a human being. These feelings of purpose and meaning are sometimes difficult to put into words—perhaps why they aren’t regularly discussed—but they are central to being a parent. I am fortunate to have a career I love and find meaningful; even so, the sense of purpose I have found through motherhood dwarfs every career milestone I have ever achieved.

From the March 2025 issue: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.

The survey results also showed that marriage comes with several advantages. Married women are about half as likely to report being lonely as unmarried women. One factor may be that married women are more likely, they report, to regularly receive physical affection and touch. Touch is, in turn, strongly linked to happiness: 22 percent of women in the survey who experienced a high level of physical touch were very happy, compared with only 7 percent of those who received a low level of touch. Touch, especially from a spouse, is associated with reduced stress, increased trust, and greater feelings of safety.

The false narrative that marriage and motherhood are a recipe for women’s unhappiness is doing a lot of damage. In a nationally representative survey that I analyzed for my book Generations, the number of 18-year-old women who expected to have children plummeted by 11 percentage points from the late 2000s to the early 2020s. Negative messaging about marriage and motherhood is likely at the root of these Gen Z shifts, along with a pervasive pessimism about everything, egged on by social media, that borders on doomerism. Young people are also profoundly lonely and spend less time with their peers in person; the consequences for their adult relationships are unknown. Recent trends are even more concerning: AI girlfriends and boyfriends now offer the prospect of “relationships” with an always-available entity that has no needs of its own. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low.

There are many reasons people choose not to have children or not to get married, but false messages about happiness should not be one of them. The articles I read long ago were right that parenting (and marriage) can often be exhausting. But they ignored the sense of meaning that comes from parenthood and the connection of physical touch at the core of family life. After all, an AI boyfriend can’t hug you back—to say nothing of an AI child.

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