This was a song released by Queen in 1976, which reached No.2 in the UK charts and No.13 in the US. It is a song about a desperate search to find love; to find someone to love. There is a desire amongst many people to find love; to find “the one”. An overwhelming majority of us report considering marriage as part of our ideal lifestyle, and we often project this preference on to others. An unmarried forty-year-old is ‘unlucky’ or has yet to meet ‘the one’: as if being married is something for all of us, and that there is someone out there for every one of us. The narrative surrounding the magic of marriage is pervasive, starting with young girls hearing about handsome princes saving (largely passive) princesses.
For many of us, being married is good for our wealth, health and happiness. This is especially true for men, who, on average, can expect to earn more money, live longer and report being more satisfied with their lives when they tie than knot as compared to when they do not. Well, we don’t know this for sure because we can’t conduct randomised controlled trials to isolate the true “treatment effects” of marriage but we can make good causal inferences from longitudinal data.
The variance around the mean matters just as much as the mean effects. It seems that marriage is more of a gamble for women than it is for men – in heterosexual marriages at least, as we don’t have much data on same sex marriages. There are persuasive data showing that unless she marries a “good ‘un”, she really would be better off (in every sense) from dodging the marriage bullet. This is interesting, not least because the narrative to get hitched is much more powerful for her than it is for him.
Not all marriages last, of course – about two in five in the UK end in divorce. Presently, four out of five divorces in the US are led by women. The narrative may nudge them into marriage but, once there, they eventually realise the raw deal they are getting and want to get out. In contrast, the same gendered pattern does not hold for cohabitation, where both men and women are equally likely to end a relationship. This suggests that there’s something special about the institution of marriage that women want to escape from more than men.
Interestingly, it appears that women are less likely to experience the worst of the negative impacts of divorce, e.g. men are ten times more likely to commit suicide following the dissolution of marriage than women. The greater ability of women to cope following divorce is thought to be because they generally have better support networks than men, and they are also more willing to ask for help. It probably also has something to do with the fact that in most cases the divorce was their decision in the first place. We know from the literature on resilience that feeling as if we have more control over a negative event can help us to cope better.
Love and marriage do not always go together like a horse and carriage, and so this post should return to its intended theme of love. One of my wonderful EMSc Behavioural Science students from a few years ago focussed his dissertation on whether it was better to have loved than lost to have never loved at all. Unsurprisingly perhaps, most people agreed with this sentiment and were willing pay cold hard cash for the experience of love, even if it all ended in disaster. It is hard to think of such strong preferences for any other experience or stimulus that could end up making us more miserable than happy overall.
Some significant part of the thirst for love for many of us will be the innate desire to pass on our genes. In this regard, feeling love towards an intimate partner for the time it takes for us to have children with them and to care for those kids in their early years has clear evolutionary advantage. As life expectancies have increased significantly over the past century, there are some interesting questions about the kinds and qualities of love that keep many couples together way past the point at which they serve the function of ensuring and maximising their genetic survival.
One thing is for sure, whether or not we have children, many of us will fall in and out of love several times in our lives. Five in every six relationships of three years or more breaks down. So, whilst many of us will feel the urge, akin to Freddie Mercury’s lyrics, to find somebody to love, we should perhaps also accept that it might not take too long for us to need to find somebody else to love. That might not be the most romantic note to finish on, but realism rarely is.