Last month, there was a welter of media coverage of a study purporting to show that the health and welfare benefits of marriage had been oversold by a range of earlier studies. 

However, Dr. Scott Yenor, a political science professor a Boise State University, says there are serious flaws in the study.

Yenor, author of ‘Family Politics’ says the study “uses the ‘thinnest’ understanding of human happiness – one that requires the least of any human being – and judges relationships on that basis”.

The study, according to Dr Yenor, uses the “self-assessment of individual happiness” as a standard to judge the value of a social institution, a standard he thinks defenders of marriage are often too inclined to use in a way that undercuts more serious arguments in favour of marriage, chiefly its benefits to children.

Yenor explained. “The questions that they ask these people are along the lines of: ‘Do you feel good about yourself?’ They use such low standards to judge these situations.”

“The lower the bar, the easier it is to hop over. They asked questions like whether married and cohabiting people were ‘satisfied with themselves.’ That’s a very low bar.” 

He also points out none of the benchmarks they used to judge the “benefits” of marriage against cohabitation actually involved the respondent’s evaluation of the relationship itself.

He suggests some questions that the researchers could have asked, such as: “Do you trust the other person? Are you more ‘one’ with the other person? Do you pool your resources? Do you share labour? Do you share goals? Do you talk about the things you hold in common, and try to make them better?”

“Those are the things I would expect marriage to be better for, than cohabitation – not things like, ‘Taken altogether, are you happy?’”

Interestingly, he suggests that the defenders of marriage have in some ways played into the hands of their opponents by themselves focusing on marriage as a source of individual fulfillment for adults.

“What a lot of conservative scholars have done with the family – and this is what the journal article’s going against – is to say: ‘Even given the pitifully thin goal of modern self-esteem, marriage is better than cohabitation.’”

“Usually you want to judge marriage on other grounds: ‘Is it good for the kids? Is love present? Are people living more virtuous lives?’ But since society’s rejected those kinds of standards, conservative defenders of marriage are willing to use the standard: ‘Does it provide happiness and self-esteem?’”

“What I try to argue in my book, is that defenders of marriage and family life need to defend it on ‘thicker’ grounds,” says Yenor.

“Once we give up, and say marriage is about promoting individual happiness and self-esteem, we’ve already lost most of the battle. The marriage that exists to promote those goals is already going to be a weak marriage.”

“We need to defend marriage as a serious community that requires commitment, time, and investment – getting away from the goals that modern autonomy has set, and back to what the family’s true goals are.”

Pro-family sociologists, Yenor warned, will find the institution of family “increasingly difficult to defend” on the basis of their opponents’ own assumptions about mere individual happiness.

To be fair to the researchers who compiled this study, it is common for researchers who examine family relationships to examine the consequences of these for individual “well-being”—often measured by self-esteem, global happiness, and/or depression. 

Many family scholars believe that the meaning of marriage today is increasingly becoming “hedonic”; in other words, purely focused on adult happiness. 

Some scholars interpret this trend as positive—others rightly point out that this can be an unstable foundation for relationships with potentially dire consequences for children.