Marriage
Do All Married Couples Grow Less Happy Over Time?
People who stay married tend to grow more dissatisfied as time goes on, research finds.
Updated February 16, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
More than a decade ago, social scientists established the trajectory of satisfaction with life for people who got married and stayed married. By then, many studies had already shown that in the years leading up to the day of their wedding, people become increasingly satisfied, perhaps because they are being celebrated by friends and family and anticipating that they really will live happily ever after.
But within a year of getting married, satisfaction begins to decline. Then it continues to decline until people end up as satisfied or as dissatisfied as they were in the years before they got married.
A new study suggests that the previous results may have been overly optimistic. The dip in satisfaction does not stop or level off; on average, continuously married people just keep getting more and more dissatisfied.
The findings were first reported online in January of this year (2025) in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, in “Changes in Well-Being and Relationship Satisfaction in the Years Before and After Marriage in a Sample of New Zealand Adults.” Hannah E. Dupuis of Simon Fraser University and her colleagues there and at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analyzed 14 years of annual survey data from 1,520 participants who were coupled, but not married, when they first started the study, and who then got married and stayed married.
Every year, the participants indicated whether or not they were married. They also indicated how satisfied they were with their life and with their relationship with their partner. They rated their “subjective well-being” every year too. Often happiness is included as a measure of well-being, but in this study, participants reported on their health, standard of living, future security, and personal relationships.
The Growing Satisfaction in the Years Leading up to Marriage, Then a Continuous Decline
In the years leading up to marriage, participants’ satisfaction with their lives, their relationship with their partner, and their health and well-being all increased steadily. Yet within a year of the day they got married, every kind of satisfaction declined noticeably.
From then on, their satisfaction just kept decreasing. The graphs (Figure 2) show that after five years of marriage, satisfaction was lower than it was six years before the marriage.
The Explanations Offered and the Possibilities Not Mentioned
All the participants were romantically coupled (and not married) when they started the study. Among unmarried couples, satisfaction with their relationship typically drops over time. Perhaps, the authors suggest, that’s because of greater conflict, less sexual intimacy, or greater boredom.
What was interesting in this study is that there was a noticeable drop in life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and personal well-being within a year of getting married. Something about getting married seemed to be related to an even greater decline in satisfaction than is typical of couples who stay unmarried.
Dupuis and her colleagues did not test any explanations, but they suggested that the initial drop in satisfaction shortly after the wedding could be due to disillusionment or dashed expectations. Maybe marriage wasn’t all they had been led to expect it was, after all. Then, the authors speculate, maybe satisfaction continues to decrease because there is even more conflict and fewer constructive behaviors.
I wonder whether some of the married people who were becoming increasingly dissatisfied were missing their unmarried lives. Even though they were already coupled when they started the study, they may have felt more freedom to arrange their lives as they liked, to spend time with people other than their partner, and to take time for themselves before they were officially married. Perhaps some looked back longingly to the time when they were single—not married and not romantically partnered either. Maybe some were single at heart and would have flourished by staying single.
What’s Important About These Findings
The findings from this study don't offer a particularly positive picture of the satisfaction of married people. That's especially remarkable because the only married people included in the study were those who got married and stayed married. We know from other research that people who get divorced are often already becoming less satisfied, rather than more so, as the day of their wedding approaches. Then they continue to become even more dissatisfied. If everyone who got married, and not just those who stayed married, had been included in the study, marital satisfaction would have been even worse.
The married couples who stay married are the most celebrated of all couples. Effusive stories are written about them in books and popular magazines. Those accounts rarely mention that the typical trajectory of satisfaction, even for this cream of the marriage crop, is downward.
Another implication is even more important. Headlines about research findings often claim that married people are happier, healthier, or better off in some other way than unmarried people. Whenever you see such a claim, look at whether the married and unmarried people were compared at just one point in time. That’s often the case.
The implication left dangling is that if only those unmarried people would get married, they would live happily ever after. What is left unsaid, sometimes even by social scientists, is that we know what happens when people get married. Typically, they become more and more dissatisfied.
Unmentioned in the study I’ve been discussing is that we know what happens to single people’s satisfaction with their single lives as they sail past midlife and into later life. Several studies show that their satisfaction tends to keep growing. People who are not looking for a partner, such as the single at heart, tend to become especially satisfied.
As is true for all studies in the social sciences, there are always exceptions. Sometimes people who get married do live happily ever after. And sometimes people who stay single don’t.
The problem is that the story that gets the most attention is the one about getting married and living happily ever after. Ironically, the fairy tale hype may be undermining the eventual happiness of those who believe it.
Facebook image: F01 PHOTO/Shutterstock
