YET ANOTHER study has allegedly shown that married couples without children are the happiest couples of all. This is somewhat like saying people who don’t own houses make the happiest home dwellers. Well, duh. If you don’t own a house, you don’t lie awake at night thinking about the leaking roof. Similarly, people without marriages (marriage as an institution is intended for procreation) do not have many of the hassles of marriage.

— Comments —

Matthew Creek writes:

I wonder how these childless couples are going to feel in their golden years, particularly after the first of the two dies.

The study does not indicate how the satisfaction of the childless married couples compares with that of the married couples with children as a function of their age, but I would not be surprised if the childless couples are happier earlier in their lives, and then less happy later in their lives. After all, rearing children, among other things, is an enormous investment on the part of the parents. But there is often a correspondingly-enormous payoff to that investment later in life that comes in many forms. The most obvious of these are grandchildren and great-grandchildren, along with the help (physical, financial, etc.) that the adult children can provide to the aged couple. I think these happier childless married couples are being short-sighted.

Laura writes:

Isn’t it interesting that there simply aren’t stories about surveys of older couples, comparing those without children and those with children, whereas there are many stories like this one? That’s not accidental at all. The news media is a branch of advertising. It is in the business of selling hedonism.

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