Happy Valentine's Day - Benefits of Marriage:

You don't hear it often enough but there are myriad benefits to being married.  Some of the Benefits of Marriage include:

• Married couples report greater sexual satisfaction. The highest levels of sexual satisfaction were reported by individuals who were in married, monogamous relationships, while those who were single or cohabiting reported slightly lower levels of sexual satisfaction.₁
• Married women report higher levels of physical and psychological health. Formerly married women reported the worst health while never married women fell between these two groups. Compared with unmarried women, married women had less job stress, environment stress, child stress, financial stress, and relationship stress. Health measures included self-rated health, distress level, chronic illness, and a number of stress types, ranging from social life stress to job strain.₂
• Married people are more likely to volunteer. Compared to unmarried peers, married adults were1.3 times more likely to have volunteered for socialservices and averaged 1.4 times more volunteer hours.₃
• Being married increases the likelihood of affluence. This association applied to all age groups.₄
• Married people tend to experience less depression and fewer problems with alcohol. Men who married and stayed married tended to be less depressed than those who remained single. Among women, marriage was associated with fewer alcohol problems.₅
• Getting married increases the probability of moving out of a poor neighborhood. Marriage nearly doubled the probability that a person would move from a poor to a non-poor neighborhood. Likewise, the dissolution of a marriage more than doubled the probability that a person would move from a non-poor to poor neighborhood. Among blacks, marital dissolution increased the likelihood of moving from a non-poor to a poor neighborhood almost six-fold.₆
• Married men make more money. Taking into consideration a number of factors including educational attainment, compared with unmarried peers, married men earned, on average, 20 percent more in wages.₇
• Ever-married women are less likely to experience poverty. Compared to never-married peers, women who had ever been married were substantially less likely to be poor—regardless of race, family background, non-marital births, or education. Ever-married women have a poverty rate that was roughly one-third lower than the poverty rate of never-married women. Currently married women had an even lower probability of living in poverty—about two-thirds lower than other women.₈
• Marriage is associated with a lower mortality risk. Compared to married individuals, those who have never been married had nearly twice the mortality risk. Divorced or separated individuals ran a mortality risk more than 50 percent higher than those who were married. The black-white mortality gap narrowed when marital status was taken into account.₉