Does family life make us happier?

For many people, starting a family is almostnot the most important goal in life. Based on this fact, it can be assumed that the better the personal life of such people develops, the more happy they feel. A huge amount of research has been conducted on the relationship between having a romantic relationship and the physical and emotional state of people throughout the history of mankind. However, in the course of most of them, scientists did not pay attention to factors such as the presence of divorces and other problems in their personal lives. Scientists from the American state of Michigan decided to take all this into account and study the relationship between the quality of people's personal life and their emotional state in more detail. It turned out that family life really makes people happier, but there are some nuances.

Family life makes people happy, but there is one thing ...

Happiness in personal life

The results of the scientific work were published inscientific publication The Journal of Positive Psychology. As part of the study, scientists examined data on 7,532 people collected between 1968 and 2010. The database began to be collected when the volunteers were 18 years old, and the collection was stopped at the age of 60. As part of the project, the researchers asked the volunteers about their marital status every few years. Thus, the researchers have at their disposal data on which people, over the entire period of scientific work, found a family, divorced or remained single. At the end of the study, the volunteers were asked to rate their level of happiness on a scale of 1 to 5.

It is believed that a happy family should look like this

The participants were divided into three groups, depending on the changes in their marital status throughout adulthood:

• people with long and happy relationships were counted 79%;
• widows and people who got divorced or started families several times, 13% were identified;
• lonely among all volunteers there were about 8%.

See also: Why can't we predict who we'll fall in love with?

The happiest people

People who have spent their whole lives with onepartner cannot be called the happiest. At the end of the study, they rated their level of happiness at 3.8 points. However, they were happier than the other two groups. Loners said they were 3.6 points happy. People who changed their marital status several times rated their happiness level at 3.5 points. It turns out that for the sake of their happiness, people still need to try to create a strong family. Another takeaway is that it's better to be a loner than to jump from one failed relationship to another.

Some of the research findings are, of course, debatable.

According to researchers, divorced and singlepeople may feel less happy due to social isolation. After all, all people need love and care. This is evidenced even by studies of paleontologists. I remember a couple of years ago I already talked about how our distant ancestors went through very difficult times thanks to caring for each other. My colleague Lyubov Sokovikova recently spoke about the same thing - research has shown that caring for loved ones can be the deep meaning of life for us.

Whatever one may say, caring is important both in human society and in the animal world.

Based on the research results, it turns outthat family life is good, and even occasional loneliness is bad. Most likely, this is true, but the authors of the scientific work warn that in some points they may be wrong. They do not yet draw unambiguous conclusions, because other factors can influence the feeling of happiness. The most obvious of these is the character of each person. It just so happened that some people look at life with optimism, despite their marital status. And another part of people sometimes does not appreciate the relationship that they have, and are looking for happiness in something else.

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After all, to feel happiness, you can not only surroundyour loved ones. Recently, researchers from the University of Miami announced that you can regularly experience new experiences to take your quality of life to the next level. So, if you have apathy and life seems gray and monotonous, go for a walk around the city and look in places you have never been. Listen to music that is new to yourself and watch movies that you have never thought about watching. You can read about how new experience makes us happier in this article. Enjoy reading and be happy!