Tchuh, women. Never bloody happy, are they? Except, it turns out, they are, just not in the way they were told to be, and thought they should be. According to a new book by Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, marriage and children do not – despite several millennia of literature claiming otherwise – give women the sought after happy ending. In fact, they put them at “higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts”. (Dolan does not specify whether those mental conditions include insanity from watching the same Peppa Pig episode 1,174 times.)
Now, I’m going to take some things for granted, the first of which is that Dolan is referring to heterosexual married couples, as is implied by how he has discussed his findings so far. The second is that the people Dolan interviewed are answering honestly, or at least do so eventually. By some measure, my favourite part of these findings is that while married people express greater happiness than other groups, they do so only when their spouse is in the room. “When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable,” Dolan said at the Hay festival last weekend. And yet, while married men reap some benefits from their misery – longer life, better earnings – married women can only look forward to dying sooner than their single, happier counterparts.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EGBXBs
