Does divorce make you happier?

Divorce is a leap in the dark. Does it make people happier, or not? A recent IZA discussion paper by Andrew J. Oswald and Jonathan Gardner, Do Divorcing Couples Become Happier By Breaking Up? , investigates whether people who split up actually become happier. The authors use General Health Questionnaire and life-satisfaction scores from the British Household Panel Survey. They conclude:

This study finds that divorce works. The longitudinal evidence in the paper suggests that marital dissolution eventually produces a rise in psychological wellbeing. Both men and women gain, and do so approximately equally. For those couples who take it, the leap into the dark seems to improve their lives.

...divorce is traumatic in the short run. Yet, comparing two years before marital breakdown with two years afterwards, it is associated with an improvement of approximately one point on a standard General Health Questionnaire measure of mental stress. Whether this psychological benefit from divorce should be viewed as large or small is a matter of judgment. It is one fifth of the size, in absolute value, of the immediate impact effect upon mental wellbeing of the death of a spouse (and that is, perhaps as might be expected, the worst life event that is detectable in standard data sets).

But this does not mean you should rush out and divorce:

This paper’s results do not mean that greater numbers of British couples should dissolve their unions. Consistent with common sense, the data demonstrate that the men and women who split up were initially more highly stressed than the norm in the married population. We interpret this to mean that less happy partnerships are the ones that tend to end.

Some of the related findings on remarriage and children are also interesting:

...perhaps surprisingly, whether a person remarries quickly does not seem to influence that individual’s wellbeing level two years after divorce. Nevertheless, those who go on to remarry do have slightly easier transitions around the year of divorce. 

...there is a little evidence that people with dependent children suffer more from marital breakdown. The size of this effect, however, is not significantly different from zero at conventional confidence levels.

Comments

[Andrew Leigh]

Trackback: http://imaginingaustralia.blogs.com/imagining/2005/10/welcome_to_spli.html

[Sharon White]

I wonder if there are any numbers on getting rid of the kids instead of the spouse. What about sending your kids off to college. That's got to do something for the feeling of wellbeing. I mean even if they flunk, they're not doing it at home.

[dilbert dogbert]

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It is hard to believe that death of a spouse is the minimum detectable event. Been there, done that and my experience is that the impact is so powerful that it almost made me non functional. Death of child is also right up there on the scale of health impacting events from my family's experience.

Makes one wonder about standard data sets.

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Consistent with common sense, the data demonstrate that the men and women who split up were initially more highly stressed than the norm in the married population