Loved and lost or never loved at all? Lifelong marital histories and their links with subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

Marriage has been linked to higher well-being. However, previous research has generally examined marital status at one point in time or over a relatively short window of time. In order to determine if different marital histories have unique impacts on well-being in later life, we conducted a marital sequence analysis of 7,532 participants from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (54.2% women; M_age = 66.68, SD = 8.50; 68.7% White/Caucasian). Three different marital sequence types emerged: a ‘consistently-married’ group (79%), a ‘consistently-single’ group (8%), and a ‘varied histories’ group (13%), in which individuals had moved in and out of various relationships throughout life. The consistently-married group was slightly higher in well-being at the end of life than the consistently-single and varied histories groups; the latter two groups did not differ in their well-being. The results are discussed in the context of why marriage is linked to well-being across the lifespan.

KEYWORDS:

• Sequence analysis
• lifespan approach
• marital history
• subjective well-being
• life satisfaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Worth noting, it wasn’t until 2009 that PSID started assessing life satisfaction, so plenty of participants were much older than age 60 (i.e. those born prior to 1949). As a result, the age at which this first assessment took place varies considerably. To account for this variability, we controlled for age at assessment in all analyses.

2. The costs for insertions, deletions, and substitutions were all set to 1.

Additional information

Funding

This study was not preregistered. This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging [P01AG029409, R01-AG051142, 2R03AG054705-01A1]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Portions of this research were presented at the 2020 SPSP (New Orleans, LA) Conference.