As a liberal married mom, this is good news to me! However, I always wonder about the direction of causality with this stuff. The director of the Institute of Family Studies wrote a book called Get Married and much of IFS’s work is geared towards encouraging family formation, but does marriage make you happier, or are happier people more likely to marry? Married women tend to have higher social integration and higher social capital (income, education) than unmarried women. They start out with advantages in the happiness department.

I went to the Institute of Family Studies website to read the full report, and was bugged by the framing of these highlights, which are set up for easy posting on X (no Bluesky button, my dudes?). Two of the three tweets are worded in opposition to “left-leaning women” or “progressives.” As I say on here all the time, plenty of left-leaning women are stably married, and there isn’t really a loud anti-marriage lobby among progressives (the chief “progressive” villain in this report is Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, who is far from a representative voice, and also not a political figure in any way). Why not try to create bipartisan goodwill for marriage and problem-solve to remove barriers to it? For example, generous maternity and paternity leaves are marriage-promoting policies that we could get both parties behnd!