Reality Check? We are social animals, and we cannot survive in isolation. We NEED relationships.
Marriage is an arrangement that allows you to fulfill all of your needs. I also like the concept of live-in, but due to its social unacceptance, it is not always the best option.
There are certain benefits to marriage:
- You have someone you can call your own, your family,
- You get more social acceptance,
- As per research, meaningful relationships increase your lifespan.
Better life for kids
Children lead healthier, longer lives if parents get and stay married. The stats tell us that children from separated marriages are more likely to get addicted to smoking and alcohol.
Here’s a statistic:
In one long-term study that followed a sample of highly advantaged children (middle-class whites with IQs of at least 135) 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 40-year-olds whose parents stayed married.
Excellent arrangement for physical needs
Married people have a higher frequency of sex and higher satisfaction levels. Separated men and women are much less likely to engage in physical intimacies, and even when they do, it misses emotions, and that void is hard to ignore.
What does the stat say? Almost a quarter of single guys and 30 percent of single women lead sexless lives.)
Better health, both physical and emotional
The biggest research on Happiness conducted by Harvard revealed that your happiness is directly related to the quality of your relationships. Both money and fame were not close to being the dominant determinants of your happiness.
Moreover, research has shown that happily married people have stronger immune systems and live longer.
Here’s an excerpt from a similar article:
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.
How happy are the divorced? If people divorce in order to be happy, as we are often told, the majority should demand their money back. Just 18 percent of divorced adults say they are “very happy,” and divorced adults are twice as likely as married folk to say they are “not too happy” with life in general. Only a minority of divorcing adults go on to make marriages that are happier than the one they left. “Divorce or be miserable,” certain cultural voices tell us, but, truth be told, “Divorce and be miserable” is at least as likely an outcome.
Whenever the topic of marriage arises, most attention goes toward divorce rates. And the mounting rates of divorces do say something about how hard it is to make a marriage successful. But marriage, at the end of the day, is good for you, and once you have that awareness, you get an incentive to choose wisely and make your marriage work.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Choosing a partner wisely is the prerequisite to avail all of these marriage benefits. Your marriage can be a disaster if you are not savvy about that.
These articles will help:
What do High-Value Women Do Differently in Relationships?
Why does the majority fail at relationships, and how can you not?
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Thanks for reading.
Check out my other pieces on relationships and life here: Bhanu Singhal
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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