Women, being married needn’t make you unhappy – if you choose the right man

Hadley Freeman

A happiness expert says wives are more miserable than other women. Is it because they find they’ve married another child?

‘Doing the cooking should mean more than occasionally making a Sunday roast and leaving all the washing-up.’ Photograph: Alamy

Tchuh, women. Never bloody happy, are they? Except, it turns out, they are, just not in the way they were told to be, and thought they should be. According to a new book by Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, marriage and children do not – despite several millennia of literature claiming otherwise – give women the sought-after happy ending. In fact, they put them at “higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts”. (Dolan does not specify whether those mental conditions include insanity from watching the same Peppa Pig episode 1,174 times.)
Now, I’m going to take some things for granted, the first of which is that Dolan is referring to heterosexual married couples, as is implied by how he has discussed his findings so far. The second is that the people Dolan interviewed are answering honestly, or at least do so eventually. And yet, while married men reap some benefits from their misery – longer life, better earnings – married women can only look forward to dying sooner than their single, happier counterparts.

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Various theories have been put forward since about why single, child-free women are happier than married mothers, all of which can be summed up as: “Um duh, because of the freedom, HELLO?!” And this is no doubt true, but it also skips a crucial factor: if married mothers aren’t happy, and don’t feel free to enjoy themselves, the problem isn’t marriage – it’s the men they’re married to.
While the majority of my chats with British female friends this week have been about Dolan’s findings, all my recent conversations with American girlfriends have been about an article in the New York Times, which ran earlier this month, beneath the frankly irresistible headline: “What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With”. Written by clinical psychologist Darcy Lockman, the article includes some – if you are a woman in a heterosexual relationship with children – unforgettable statistics: on average, women do at least 65% of the childcare; it will take another 75 years for true equality on that front; and if you think that’s unfair, you are more likely to suffer from depression. It will possibly not surprise you that Lockman is about to publish a book entitled, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership.
It has long been obvious that we are in a transitional period, one in which more women than ever with young children are working, and yet the mother is still very much seen as the primary parent. This increasingly impossible situation is all too obvious in working practices, with one in five women reporting last year that they experienced discrimination related to pregnancy or flexible working hours from their boss or colleagues, according to a study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
And while men’s salaries are unaffected by children, women’s earnings plummet and plateau, not just because they are wildly more likely to be the one to reduce their hours, but because those reduced-hour jobs offer little in the way of progression and promotion.

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But it is also true in relationship dynamics. The generation of women who are having children now grew up being told they could and should expect full equality. While the men they marry tend to have grown up with a similar message, anyone who has spoken with a married, straight female friend with children in the past decade will know that there is a difference between theory and practice. And there is nothing like having kids to test how committed your partner really is to equality.
Since my female friends started to have children, not a week has gone by without me hearing the kind of gendered complaint that would seem too obvious for an ITV3 sitcom: the husband who thinks “doing the cooking” means occasionally making a Sunday roast and leaving all the washing-up; the man who thinks “childcare” means dropping the kids off with his mother; men who are apparently incapable of remembering when their children’s school holidays are, and take it for granted that their wife will “sort something out”; the husband who thinks “equality” means doing slightly more than his father did (that’s the shot and here’s the chaser: his wife works and his mother did not). And these are the “good” dads.
Before Captain #notallmen swoops in to protest, obviously this is not all men (and for the sake of my own domestic happiness, I should add that the father of my children is very much not such a man). But the happiness gaps between single, child-free women and married, child-laden ones, and married men and married women, should make not one but two groups re-examine their domestic set-up: the wives, yes, but also the husbands. Because if your wife is unhappy it is possibly because she was hoping she had married a partner, not another child.
• Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 30 May 2019 to remove text based on remarks by Paul Dolan that reflected a misunderstanding of an aspect of the source data.

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