A lot of people these days prefer to avoid weddings due to a bunch of different reasons, including the stress of the big day and the financial burden that often accompanies traditional marriages. Or believe that marriage is a social relic of the past. Why do you need a silly piece of paper anyways? But, there are some notable benefits to tying the knot that you and your partner should consider before completely writing marriage off as a possibility for the future.
We should note here that marriage is not a way to solve problems in your relationship. Significant, long-term problems will persist whether you have a marriage license or not. As creepy as this may sound, getting the law involved with your relationship might make it feel more real and long term! After all, if you decide to get a marriage license, you have to get legally divorced, which can prevent any sort of wishy washy feelings about commitment.
Marriage proves commitment to your partner forever barring anything out of the ordinary , which can make both partners feel more at ease and secure in the relationship.
Knowing that you are committed to one another through marriage can also help you and your partner rise above conflict and rough patches. Knowing that you have a lifelong commitment will strengthen your bond through thick and thin, sickness and health, etc. Relish provides personalized coaching to you and your partner on YOUR time so you can meet your relationship goals as a couple. Try our award winning relationship app free for one week, no strings attached!
Like we mentioned, in recent years formal dating culture seems to have fallen out of popularity in favor of things like « talking » and hookup culture and dating around. This coupled with the rising acceptance and prevalence of open relationships and polyamory can make it really hard to understand exactly where you stand in your relationship. Engagement and marriage offer labels that define the exact terms of your relationship. In addition to proving commitment as we discussed above , marriage spells out long term monogamy unless otherwise negotiated and various rights and privileges you can expect more on that to come in your relationship.
In an age when people are afraid to DTR AKA define the relationship , it can be important to get married so that both people are on the same page, and comfortable with the longevity of the relationship. This security can help you feel more at ease with your relationship, promoting growth and a closer relationship. In addition to the emotional and psychological benefits of marriage, there are also legal benefits to consider.
Married couples have the right to a tax deduction, the ability to jointly file taxes which saves tons of money , Social Security benefits, IRA benefits, health insurance benefits, legal decision making benefits, inheritance benefits, and prenuptial benefits if you establish those before the marriage.
Like it or not, a lot of social institutions encourage marriage through monetary, social and other legal incentives! While these things may seem abstract and kind of like legalese, these benefits can be really important in the case of medical emergencies, sudden deaths I know morbid, sorry and other unforeseen circumstances.
If you are planning to spend your life together anyways, the legal benefits of marriage are often a compelling reason to just do the damn thing and officially read: legally tie the knot.
Believe it or not, marriage is actually correlated with living longer, especially for men. Studies have shown that married men tend to live longer than single men, or men in less defined relationships, because they are more likely to create and keep medical appointments and follow through with treatment and therapy.
Men begin to see themselves as fathers, providers, and protectors when they transition into marriage. Third, research on sacrifice in marriage provides another window on potential differences between men and women. My colleagues and I have found that commitment to the future is more important in explaining male attitudes about sacrifice in marriage than female attitudes about sacrifice. There are a number of possible interpretations of findings like this. For example, women may be more socialized to give to others, regardless of the commitment status of a particular relationship.
But I have a hypothesis that goes further: For men to sacrifice for their partners without resenting it, they need to have decided that a particular woman is the one they plan to be with in the future. In contrast, I believe that the average woman sacrifices more fully, starting earlier on in romantic relationships, than the average man. To summarize the main point, getting married has historically brought a large change in how men see themselves and how they behave.
Over thousands of years of history, women would have come to expect a substantial change in men from tying the knot. There may be groups where my theory simply does not hold, or it may no longer hold the way it may have at one time. A number of sociologists have found that the motives to get married or to avoid marriage may be different for those at lower incomes than for those who are middle- or higher-income. Some working-class women, for instance, have revealed in interviews that they resist marriage because it is harder to exit than cohabitating relationships.
Further, they reported that men would expect a more traditional division of duties by gender in marriage than is expected in cohabitation. In other words, they reported that the men they knew would, indeed, change after getting married—but that the change would be negative for these women, so they resist marriage. The motives to get married or to avoid marriage may be different for those at lower incomes.
Yet there is a potent counterweight to how far some things can change, and that has to do with the fundamental fact that women get pregnant and men do not. As some scholars argue, given the high personal costs of pregnancy and childbirth to women, it has been crucial throughout human history for women to accurately discern and if possible, increase the commitment levels of men.
The fact that females have better options and personal resources now than in past eras may well change the equation underlying my thesis, but some behavioral differences between men and women seem very likely to remain because of the biological constraint. Regardless of how much the behavior of males and females may change in the years ahead, I believe that Steve Nock had it right when, in one of the last works he wrote before his untimely passing, he predicted that marriage would become an increasingly potent signal of commitment as other relationship forms become more common i.
Not all relationship transitions are transformative, but marriage is meant to be. That means it matters. This piece was adapted from a longer scholarly paper by Scott Stanley, available here , which contains additional background and relevant citations. Sign up for our mailing list to receive ongoing updates from IFS. Interested in learning more about the work of the Institute for Family Studies?
Please feel free to contact us by using your preferred method detailed below. For media inquiries, contact Michael Toscano michael ifstudies. Married people live longer and healthier lives. The power of marriage is particularly evident in late middle age. When Linda Waite and a colleague, for example, analyzed mortality differentials in a very large, nationally representative sample, they found an astonishingly large "marriage gap" in longevity: nine out of ten married guys who are alive at 48 will make it to age 65, compared with just six in ten comparable single guys controlling for race, education, and income.
For women, the protective benefits of marriage are also powerful, though not quite as large. Nine out of ten wives alive at age 48 will live to be senior citizens, compared with just eight out of ten divorced and single women. In fact, according to statisticians Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee, who compiled a catalog of relative mortality risks, "being unmarried is one of the greatest risks that people voluntarily subject themselves to.
This is not just a selection effect: even controlling for initial health status, sick people who are married live longer than their unmarried counterparts. Having a spouse, for example, lowers a cancer patient's risk of dying from the disease as much as being in an age category ten years younger. A recent study of outcomes for surgical patients found that just being married lowered a patient's risk of dying in the hospital. For perhaps more obvious reasons, the risk a hospital patient will be discharged to a nursing home was two and a half times greater if the patient was unmarried.
Scientists who have studied immune functioning in the laboratory find that happily married couples have better-functioning immune systems. Divorced people, even years after the divorce, show much lower levels of immune function. Children lead healthier, longer lives if parents get and stay married.
Adults who fret about second-hand smoke and drunk driving would do well to focus at least some of their attention on this point. In one long-term study that followed a sample of highly advantaged children middle-class whites with IQs of at least up through their seventies, a parent's divorce knocked four years off the adult child's life expectancy.
Forty-year-olds from divorced homes were three times more likely to die from all causes than year-olds whose parents stayed married. Men today tend to think of marriage as a consumption item—a financial burden.
But a broad and deep body of scientific literature suggests that for men especially, marriage is a productive institution—as important as education in boosting a man's earnings.
In fact, getting a wife may increase an American male's salary by about as much as a college education. Married men make, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent more money than comparable single guys, even after controlling for education and job history. The longer a man stays married, the higher the marriage premium he receives.
Wives' earnings also benefit from marriage, but they decline when motherhood enters the picture. Childless white wives get a marriage wage premium of 4 percent, and black wives earn 10 percent more than comparable single women. Married people not only make more money, they manage money better and build more wealth together than either would alone.
At identical income levels, for example, married people are less likely to report "economic hardship" or trouble paying basic bills. The longer you stay married, the more assets you build; by contrast, length of cohabitation has no relationship to wealth accumulation.
Couples who stayed married in one study saw their assets increase twice as fast as those who had remained divorced over a five-year period. Marriage increases sexual fidelity. Cohabiting men are four times more likely to cheat than husbands, and cohabiting women are eight times more likely to cheat than wives. Marriage is also the only realistic promise of permanence in a romantic relationship. Just one out of ten cohabiting couples are still cohabiting after five years.
By contrast, 80 percent of couples marrying for the first time are still married five years later, and close to 60 percent if current divorce rates continue will marry for life.
One British study found that biological parents who marry are three times more likely still to be together two years later than biological two-parent families who cohabit, even after controlling for maternal age, education, economic hardship, previous relationship failure, depression, and relationship quality. Marriage may be riskier than it once was, but when it comes to making love last, there is still no better bet.
Marriage is good for your mental health. Married men and women are less depressed, less anxious, and less psychologically distressed than single, divorced, or widowed Americans.
By contrast, getting divorced lowers both men's and women's mental health, increasing depression and hostility, and lowering one's self-esteem and sense of personal mastery and purpose in life. And this is not just a statistical illusion: careful researchers who have tracked individuals as they move toward marriage find that it is not just that happy, healthy people marry; instead, getting married gives individuals a powerful mental health boost.
Nadine Marks and James Lambert looked at changes in the psychological health of a large sample of Americans in the late eighties and early nineties. They measured psychological well-being at the outset and then watched what happened to individuals over the next years as they married, remained single, or divorced. When people married, their mental health improved—consistently and substantially. When people divorced, they suffered substantial deterioration in mental and emotional well-being, including increases in depression and declines in reported happiness.
Those who divorced over this period also reported a lower sense of personal mastery, less positive relations with others, less sense of purpose in life, and lower levels of self-acceptance than their married peers did.
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