Proponents of marriage like to toss around the statistic that married people (and married men in particular) are happier and healthier than the wretched ranks of the unwed. But new research has found that the happiness/health gap is narrowing, not because the married crew is losing its happy glow (though that may indeed be occurring), but because the single component is getting happier.

The study, led by Hui Liu, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University, used data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972 to 2003. The researchers found that while the self-reported health of the married is “still better than that of the never-married,” the “gap has closed considerably.” Single women shouldn’t rejoice just yet: The uptick was due overwhelmingly to improvements in the health of never-married men. Liu thinks that this result may be “partly because never-married men have greater access to social resources and support that historically were found in a spouse.” (Female robots, perhaps? Or Internet porn?) Still, single women also saw an increase, and the singles health boost also spread across racial lines to both blacks and whites.

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The results of this study don’t really surprise me.  I know a lot of very happy single people (and while I’m not single now, I would say that I was very happy being single, too).  They just focus on work, school, friendships, and hobbies, and don’t let themselves dwell on their singleness or let themselves feel lonely.   They learn to be happy with what they do have and not worry about what they don’t have.  What do you think?

-MJ

It seems that Bridget Jones has been ousted by a new breed of women who are happy being single and living alone.

“Freemales” is the label that has been given to the growing number of women content in their single life.

The latest research from the Office for National Statistics shows the number of women living alone, between the age of 25 and 44, has doubled in the past two decades.

And research also shows single women no longer feel they need to be in a relationship to be happy.

More and more women are shunning the idea of marriage in favour of living alone and increasing numbers of women are divorcing and staying single.

These single women are happy with their lives and content with the intimacy they get from other close relationships with family and friends.

In fact, their lives are so full with work and socialising they have little time to worry about finding Mr Right.

This just goes to show that it’s far more important to have stable and supportive relationships in your life, than it is to find a partner just for the sake of having one.

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…I have no doubt that there are parents who reflexively rank parenthood as their No. 1 joy in life because they think they’re supposed to. On the other hand, there’s a big difference between finding happiness in parenting and finding happiness in every minute of every day spent caring for kids. Parenthood can be intense and exhausting, hilarious and tedious, all in the same day; and 1-year-olds don’t always make the best conversationalists. But the satisfaction of parenthood isn’t something you can take apart, rating each little task to come up with an average “happiness score.” Like all relationships, raising kids is too complex for that…

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When I lived in the country one summer an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around.

“But I’m as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?” a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he’d imply, and each time I’d think, ‘Yeah, right.’

Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn’t what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

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You may have caught that little news factoid recently that stipulated sex might just be a cure for the female blues. Which is good news really (especially for the gents trying to cheer up their surly ladies) considering a whopping estimated 800,000 Aussies suffer from depression each year. So what better antidote could there be for the blues (other than chocolate) than getting frisky between the sheets?

“Having sex helps them feel that closeness and security,” surmises Dr Sabura Allen, clinical psychologist and the lead researcher in the Monash University study.

The findings revealed that women associate sex with love (much to the horror of male booty-call buddies!).

The study also discovered that, surprisingly, single women have less sex than single men, which makes you wonder who all these men are getting it on with in the first place …

Two blokes, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth College economist, and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, undertook a similar survey. They polled 16,000 people and found that sex is so important to happiness, we should be increasing it’s frequency from once a month to once a week, (hear that folks?). Adding fuel to the more-sex debate is the fact that the happiness generated from the increased hanky-panky is equivalent to being told you’re getting a $50,000 raise on your income!

Economists have also calculated that a lasting marriage equates to the happiness generated by getting an extra $100,000 each year. (Divorce depletes happiness levels equivalent to losing $66,000 annually.)

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