Word: depaulo
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Today Michael and I are friends. On Christmas Eve, we gathered a group, and I made an enthusiastic attempt at the traditional Italian seven-fishes feast. I'm in better shape now than I was in high school, which fits with psychologist Bella DePaulo's finding (in her fascinating 2006 book on single life, Singled Out) that the period around divorce is associated with improvements in health. Divorced men are also, not surprisingly, happier than men stuck in bad marriages...
Should they feel pressure to wed at all? As Bella DePaulo demonstrates in her (ponderously titled) 2006 book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, the evidence that marriage makes us happy and healthy is quite weak. It's true that currently married people report slightly higher levels of happiness than single people. (In one big study that DePaulo cites, being married was associated with a 0.115-point increase in life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale.) But researchers can't reliably determine which causes which, the marriage or the happiness...
...course, some people end up happier after marrying, but just as many end up sadder. And that's not even accounting for divorce: DePaulo shows that people who marry and then divorce are not as happy as those who stay single. Again, divorce may not cause unhappiness (rather, unhappy people may be more likely to split). But as another study that DePaulo cites concludes, "It is better to have no relationship than to be in a bad relationship...
...DePaulo dismantles a few other claims of the pro-marriage lobby. For instance, it's true that currently married people report a better sex life than single people, but men who are divorced and living with a new girlfriend report even better sex. Also, according to a 2004 paper from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, those marrying for the first time tend to report better health--but surprisingly, the period around divorce is also associated with improved health for those breaking up. In short, we feel better when we can pair off and then dissolve those pairings when...
...Bella DePaulo of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, who has done several studies on lying in everyday life, notes that no one is totally honest all the time. "The tendency to tell lies," as Jean Piaget wrote in 1932, "is a natural tendency, spontaneous and universal." One of DePaulo's studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people told at least one lie a day, and that more socially adept folks stretched the truth more often than the less sophisticated. There's a reason the devil is always depicted as a smooth-tongued fellow...