I previously said there was a “bonafide trend back toward happiness” within marriage, for the years 2006 to 2012. This was based on the General Social Survey trend going back 1973, with married people responding to the question, “Taking all things together, how would you describe your marriage?”

Since then, the bonafide trend has lost its pop. Here’s my updated figure:

I repeated this analysis controlling for age, race/ethnicity, and education, and year specified in quadratic form. This shows happiness falling to a trough at 2004 and then starting to trend back. But given the last two points, confidence in that rebound is weak. Still a solid majority are happy with their marriages.

Who’s happy?

But who are those happy in marriage people? Combining the last three surveys, 2012, 2014, and 2016, this is what we get (effect of age and non-effect of education not shown). Note the y-axis starts at 50%.

So to be happy in marriage, my expert opinion is you should become male and White, see yourself as upper class, go to church all the time, and have extreme political views. And if you’re not all those things, don’t let the marriage promoters tell you what your marriage is going to be like.

Note: I previously analyzed the political views thing before, so this is an update to that. On trends and determinants of social class identification, see this post.)

Here’s my Stata code, written to run on the full GSS through 2016 data. Play along at home!

set maxvar 10000 use "GSS7216_R1a.dta", clear gen since73 = year-1973 gen rwgt = round(wtssall) keep if year >1972 gen verhap=0 replace verhap=1 if hapmar==1 logit verhap i.sex c.age##c.age i.degree i.race c.since73##c.since73 [weight=rwgt] margins, at(since73=(0(1)43)) recode attend (1/3=1) (4/6=2) (7/8=3), gen(attendcat) logit verhap i.sex c.age##c.age i.degree i.race i.class i.attendcat i.polviews if year>2010 [weight=rwgt] margins sex race class attendcat polviews if year>2010