Family Evaluated

Marriage Does Make a Difference

A recent Pew Research Center report indicates that a record 20 percent of adults over the age of 25 have never married, and that number is expected to rise to 25 percent by 2030. To put things in perspective, that's up from 9 percent in 1960.

Marriage has long been considered one of the milestones of achieving adulthood, but that's quickly changing. Why the shift? For many, marriage simply isn't important. Pew discovered that while 46 percent of Americans polled believe that the country is better off when people marry and have children, fully half, 50 percent, believe that we are doing just fine having other priorities. Americans also value their individual freedom more, and are cohabiting in much larger numbers. In spite of these seemingly monumental shifts in opinion, however, most Americans (68 percent) still believe that if a couple intends to remain together for life, they ought to get married. So what's keeping them away from the altar?

Economics seems to play a major role. A little over a quarter (27 percent) of those polled cite financial concerns as the reason they are not yet wed. We Americans, it seems, like to have our ducks in a row before we tie the knot instead of afterward.

The problem is that something about marriage itself seems to mature us, and by choosing to forego marriage until we have enough in our savings account, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.

There is this thing called "the marriage premium," which continues to vex social scientists who hate to admit that marriage is good for us. Both men and women—though men to a greater extent—seem to make more money when they are married. Researchers keep trying to explain this increase, and over the years, many have pointed to "specialization." Married men can "specialize" in their jobs, because their wives "specialize" in domestic labor and maintenance tasks such as cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, paying the bills, caring for children, and so forth.

But specialization isn't the whole story. In a 2013 study in the American Sociological -Review, researchers discovered that specialization does indeed partly explain the higher wages earned by married men over single men. But the researchers also discovered that married women earn more than their single peers. If specialization were the sole cause of the marriage premium, and women were specializing more in household tasks, one would expect their earnings to go down.

Whatever the cause, the marriage premium adds up to some significant cash. In a study in the Journal of Family and Economic Perspectives, Arif Mamun sought to uncover a "cohabitation premium." There does seem to be one, but it's small—something in the range of 6.5 percent, compared to 21 percent for married men. Other studies of the marriage premium have found it to be as high as 40 percent. The longer the marriage lasts, the higher the premium gets.

So how does it happen? In this age, in which marriage is supposedly a defunct institution, why do both married men and women earn more than their single and cohabiting peers? Perhaps it's because accountability to another person makes us want to do better in life. Perhaps our employers trust us more when they see us take on greater personal commitments. Or perhaps marriage is simply good for us, making us more responsible and productive, and thus higher-earning.

Whatever the reason, it seems that there is something about marriage that matures us, that not only makes us happier and healthier, but that also helps out our pocketbooks.

Oh, and children? They're supposed to be a financial drain, right? It turns out, there's this separate thing called the fatherhood premium.

But we'll leave that for another day.