What makes happy marriages, left and right

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in “Anna Karenina” that “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

A new report titled “The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Global Force for Good or Ill in the Family?” from the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institution challenges Tolstoy’s wisdom. It found that the happiest couples are actually quite different from each other. The authors of the report found that conservative, religious couples are, by far, the happiest, with secular, progressive couples in second place.

The researchers highlighted their findings in a New York Times op-ed headlined “Religious Men Can Be Devoted Dads, Too” — an unfortunate headline, since it implies that religious men are otherwise mostly known for ditching their kids.

Headline aside, the report’s real finding is that families with clear, strongly held values tend to be happiest. Its findings are highly credible, given the authors’ affiliation with the University of Virginia and the large sample size of 16,000.

Start with the very religious. Writing about the report in National Review, David French doesn’t pretend that religion is a cure-all, or that it automatically provides a happy life. But as he notes, the report does cast doubt on the idea that religious wives are all under the thumbs of their husbands with no power of their own.

“There are terrible churches, and there are abusive religious figures, including fathers, husbands and pastors,” he writes. “But I fear that in our pop culture and in our academies, the anecdotes have overwhelmed the data, and therefore our cultural elites have all too often missed the real story of the meaning, satisfaction, and virtuous purpose in America’s faithful families.”

That’s why news of happy religious families confused and alarmed people who had heard a story or two — or 50 — of someone religious and unhappy breaking free of her upbringing and leading a happier life in the cold light of secularity. Does that happen? Sure, but as French notes, the anecdotes don’t correspond with the data.

Then there’s the question of sex. The report found that those same religious conservatives enjoy far higher satisfaction in their sex lives than either secular or less religious couples do. As French points out, we never see “happy, sexually vibrant religious married couples” on TV shows or in movies.

The conventional wisdom is thus that freewheeling, secular people are having the best sex. But actually, religious conservative women reported the highest levels of sexual satisfaction, and it’s not even close.

In the Times piece, the researchers highlighted data that “two-thirds of married mothers would prefer not to work full time — a fact that is often overlooked in our public conversation about work and family, which is heavily influenced by progressive assumptions.” What women are supposed to want, and what they actually want, seem to be at odds with each other.

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In the religious world, there is much less of this feminist “supposed to want.” The traditional setup of the relationship, with the man as the breadwinner, allows for women to be honest when they would prefer to stay home with the children.

No one is there to tell them they are betraying feminism or not behaving the way women are supposed to behave. Secular guilt over making traditional choices isn’t in play. It makes sense that being allowed to make choices for yourself, and not receiving pushback against those choices, would lead to happier marriages.

Their sex lives are better, meanwhile, because they’re getting what they want from their relationships the rest of the time. A different 2016 study showed that couples had more sex when the man in the relationship helped out with the dishes. It’s less about the specific task of washing dirty dishes and more about general relationship satisfaction, whether that means the husband helps clean up or the wife is free to not have a full-time job.

For the same reasons, it makes sense that the second-happiest group in the study is secular progressive women. A progressive woman gets into her marriage with a certain expectation for her own role and also for that of her husband.

The conservative couple might divide household chores along traditional gender lines, with the man taking out the garbage and the woman clearing the table, and the progressive couple will have also preemptively decided who does what in their household. This certainty of role leads to higher satisfaction despite their many outward differences.

Maybe Tolstoy was right, after all.