Marriage makes people happier in long-run: Study

Marriage may not be a guarantee for a blissful life, but it may provide a long-lasting protection against your unhappiness, says a new study.

Researchers from the Michigan State University in the US found that getting hitched does not make one any happier as it may be rough, but it seems to be better than the alternative.

However, being married makes a person stable and happier in the long run compared to their unmarried peers who show a gradual decline in happiness as the years passed, they found.

"Our study suggests that people on average are happier than they would have been if they didn't get married," lead study author Stevie Yap was quoted as saying by 'Daily Mail'.

For their study, Yap and colleagues studied the data of thousands of participants of a national British survey. They set out to find whether personality helps people adapt to major life events.

The answer, essentially, was no: personality traits such as conscientiousness or neuroticism do not help people deal with losing a job or having a baby.

"Past research has suggested personality is important in how people react to important life events," Yap said. "But we found that there were no consistent effects of personality in how people react and adapt to these major events."

In general, same age participants who were not married showed a gradual decline in happiness as the years passed.

Those who were married, however, largely bucked this trend. It's not that marriage caused their satisfaction level to spike, Yap noted, but instead kept it, at least, stable.

The study is published in the Journal of Research in Personality.