In this week’s Time magazine, there is one conclusion that many people, in particular those happily married people may find it disturbing. Marriage will not increase your happiness. The general assumption is that those who get married start at a higher happy level than those remain single, and after a bliss of joy land at the same level as before.

Although this may surprise many people, I found this conclusion is way too conservative. My cursory observations, facilitated by my solid scientific training on cause-effect analysis :-), lead me to infer that marriage actually decreases people’s happiness. Here are my reasons.

In the US, the divorce rate is about 49%. Many couples get divorced before or at their middle age, which correspond to the maximum of about 20 years of marriage. We should agree that people get married voluntarily, and most, if not all, expect marriage to have a happy ending—happily thereafter. Unfortunately, at the time of divorce, the happiness is definitely at a much lower point than before marriage. Therefore, for almost 50% of American people, the future of marriage is gloomy.

Another bit of evidence is that about 22% of women, 50% men have extramarital affairs, based polls conducted by national opinion survey. For these people, certainly their marriage are not satisfied, at least for the sex part. As we all know, sex is one key component of human happiness.

People may say that another half American people do have their marriage lasting till the end of their life. Well, there is another evidence to show that even within the ever lasting marriage, marriage itself does not make you happier. We can assume that they do love each other (if not, there is no happiness at all in their marriage). But love means sacrificing, mutually supporting the spouses. We know that sacrifice requires you giving up something. Giving up something unlikely gives you happiness. The point is that in a married couple, somebody always sacrifices something, or at best obtains a delayed gratification, mostly derived from the other part of family. This mathematically cancels out the happiness in the whole family. So when you ask the couple whether they feel happier after marriage than before, one may say “yes”, while the other, reluctantly, may say “probably”. This is why in the survey mentioned in Time magazine, which surveyed married couple comparing those singles, it only reported almost no increase of happiness.

Now here is the catch: if marriage make you no more happy than before, why almost all people get married and remarried after their divorce? This can be easily explained by the benefit of marriage. First you have a constant support from your spouse financially, spiritually, and physically after marriage. As human beings are vulnerable, you always need somebody to take care of you. Furthermore, when one gets used to have someone taking care of miscellaneous daily life, married people lose their independency after getting married. The inertness of marriage lead people keep on getting married, in particularly for men who can’t abstain sex for long.

Now if you account all the above, mathematically, the average of American people will certainly expect a decrease of happiness after they get married. A sad reality all of us have to confront.

Before leaving this topic, I would like to spend a couple words on the origin of family, and the social function of family. In the beginning of society, the tribe is the family. People live together, gather foods together and share their foods among them, and most importantly fighting enemies together. With the accumulation of property and the growth of tribe, smaller group can make a living all by themselves. However, they may still need to live in the same location to share the nature resource and defend themselves together. With the development of economics, smaller and smaller groups were formed, and eventually a family containing one man and several women together with a couple children were formed. Furthermore, the competition among families also appeared. With the growth of family, people have to grab more resource to nurture their family.

Family is the smallest societal functional unit. Although individuals can make their own decision in modern society, married people have to make decision based on the balance of individual interests and family objectives. A society contains most stable families does provide a stable society. However, family inherently inhibits personal interests. To see this, suppose one person in a family keep on pursuing his/her goals, the other person is very likely sacrifice him/herself. Although the dominant person may be more likely to succeed with the support of family than he/she does it alone, as a society, it reduces the diversity of interests, i.e., the entropy decreases.

It is of interesting that divorce can be viewed as a way of promoting mutation in the society. Old family dissolves, new family forms. A dynamic society is more likely to provide a momentum for the advance of society. This also increases entropy, which fits the law of entropy.

It is also arguably important to consider the biological meaning of family. Family reflects a balance of the desire of spreading genes (by both men and women) and the competition among human beings. The societal norms ensure that most people will have chance to spread genes by controlling the size of families, protect their genes by forming families, and prevent overspreading genes by tightening family bond. The reasons why men have a dominant role in society reside on the fact that males are generally physically stronger, and easier to spread genes than female. Evolution just happened to make this gender difference.

It can envision that in the future, family will disappear. Modern society relies more and more on intellectual capability, and females are equally cabled as males are. Females will rise up to a level that males have enjoyed for thousands of years. At that time, only interest bond exists, no more traditional family.