Life after Divorce 207
its affect on your pocketbook? A study by Jay Zagorsky, an Ohio
State University researcher, shows that a person who marries
(and stays married) accumulates nearly twice as much personal
wealth as a person who is single or divorced. Furthermore, for
those who divorce, it is even more expensive than just giving up
half of everything they own. They lose, on average, three-fourths
of their net worth. Finally, this downward slide often starts a lot
sooner than just the date of divorce. People who divorced started
losing net worth four years before their divorces were final.
Conversely, married people tend to accumulate wealth much
faster, amassing fully 93 percent more than single or divorced
people over a fifteen-year period. Economists Andrew Oswald
and David Blanchflower actually tried to put a somewhat precise
dollar amount on the value of a happy marriage. They figure a
happy marriage is worth about $100,000 a year.
Does being a parent make you happy? Studies report that the
standard trajectory of the average marriage goes something like
this: married couples start out happy. Then, as time goes by, they
begin to feel gradually less fulfilled over the course of their lives
together. Married parents in particular tend to become somewhat
complacent and accepting of their “married with children” stage
of life, but they also tend to become slightly melancholy while
their children are growing up. Then, according to many experts,
they return to their initial levels of bliss only after their children
have grown up and moved away.
As Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert writes in his
fascinating book Stumbling on Happiness: the “indicators of hap-
piness are actually lowest among those who have children but
increase exponentially as the children leave the nest, whereupon
we mis-remember what a joy it was to raise them.”
Alarmingly, psychologists have found that people are less
happy when they are interacting with their children than they
are while pursuing other activities such as shopping, eating, exer-
cising, or even watching TV. Apparently, the task of parenting
makes most people feel just about as cheerful as doing any other
basic household task. Psychologists have studied the impact of
many of the variables that can impact couples’ lives and they
have found time and again that children have only a small impact