UK Statistics Confirm That Marriage Works

If you meet a British 15-year-old who lives with both his parents, you can be almost certain that his parents are married, a report published May 22 showed. Titled “The myth of ‘long-term stable relationships’ outside marriage,” the report, based on a survey of 40,000 households in 2010 to 2011, showed that married couples were overwhelmingly more likely to stay together than unmarried ones.

Just over a week later, a study published by the Office for National Statics (ons) showed that married couples reported themselves to be happier than singles or cohabiting couples.

The Marriage Foundation’s study showed that in an average group of 100 15-year-olds who still live with both parents, 83 will have been born to married parents and 10 will have seen their parents get married since their birth. Only six will be the children of unmarried parents who stayed together. (One unfortunate child goes “missing” only because we’re rounding the figures to the nearest whole number.)

The figures appear to support earlier predictions—that a child born to married parents has a 70 percent chance that his parents will stick together throughout his childhood. On the other hand, a child born to unmarried parents only has a 35 percent chance of them staying together.

“The relative scarcity of ‘long-term stable relationships’ outside marriage confirms that it is disingenuous and untenable for government to keep ‘airbrushing’ marriage from family policy papers,” the report’s author, Harry Benson, wrote.

Meanwhile, the ons report found that while the amount of money people earned didn’t affect their happiness, marriage did. When asked to rate how happy they were on a scale of 0 to 10, married people rated themselves 0.14 points happier than cohabiting couples, 0.3 points higher than singles and 0.4 points higher than those who had divorced or separated. The survey of around 165,000 found that the only factors more important to a person’s happiness was their health and their employment status (whether they had a job or not).

Study after study continually confirms that marriage is the best way to conduct family life and bring up children. That is because it was designed by a loving and all-powerful Creator. For more information on why marriage works, see our free booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete?