The only Americans showing a clear positive balance of happiness after the pandemic are married ones, according to Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business who has tracked the General Social Survey’s happiness question for years. Unmarried adults — about 45% of the adult population — are now net unhappy. Peltzman calls it a happiness-segregated society by marriage.

The overall picture is not a rebound so much as a hole that has barely filled in. The balance between “very happy” and “not too happy” held steady from 1972 through 2018, then dropped 25 points when the pandemic hit. It has recovered five. For comparison, Peltzman put the Great Recession’s hit at 10 points at most, and said it came back right away.

Split by marital status, the two lines diverge sharply. Married respondents moved from roughly +30 to +50. Unmarried respondents went from near breakeven to about -15. Both groups took a hit in the crash, and Peltzman said if anything the unmarried were hit slightly harder. The married cohort held its ground and then improved; the unmarried cohort did not.

The obvious explanation — fewer people are married, so the average fell — does not hold. Peltzman said the marriage rate has not moved in 15 years, sitting at roughly 55/45. Rates did decline from the 1970s through the early 2000s, and his earlier work found that decline explained most of the pre-pandemic happiness slide, but that slide had leveled off well before 2020. What changed was not how many people are married, but how much worse it now feels to be unmarried.

The affordability explanation does not hold either, at least not in the direction most people would assume. Peltzman’s data show the steepest declines among the groups that started with the most — white, high-income, college-educated, right-leaning Americans — and he noted that affordability pressure is a lower-income concern while upper-income people were hit hardest in the crash. Explanations resting on inequality, he said, are not consistent with the facts.

He is emphatic about the limits of the finding. Happy people get married and married people become happy, he said, and warned against making personal decisions on the basis of the data. A separate 2025 paper of his found the marital premium holds across nearly every group tested — age, race, income, education, sexual orientation — with cohabiting couples getting a smaller version, about 10 points. Correlation, not a prescription.

Other researchers point at the social side rather than the balance sheet. Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies said economic pessimism contributes, as young people worry about inflation and housing costs, but that the negativity bias of social media and declines in socializing, dating and marriage loom larger, because young adults’ social ties have deteriorated far more than their economic position has. The age data support the emphasis: from 2000 to 2019, roughly 10% to 15% of every age group reported being not too happy, but from 2021 to 2024 the 18-to-35 group jumped to 26%, against 20% for the middle-aged and 21% for those 56 and up. Peltzman also found that Americans’ belief that other people treat them fairly crashed in the same year and by the same scale, which he described as social glue coming apart.

For businesses, the practical content is that the American consumer is not one consumer. Gallup’s wellbeing data from 2009 to 2023 found 61% of married adults aged 25 to 50 classified as thriving against 45% of those who never married, a 16-point gap. That gap is not new; what is new is a large unmarried bloc that has moved into net-negative territory on the broadest happiness measure available.

The economic sorting behind it is well established. Researchers describe a marriage divide in which people with more education and stable earnings are both more likely to marry and less likely to divorce — 69% of college-graduate women were married by 2010 against 56% of women with only a high school diploma, and the gap has widened since — concentrating the advantages of marriage in higher-income households. The marriage rate has fallen 26% since 2000 while the divorce rate has fallen by nearly half, which produces fewer married households that are, on average, more financially stable than the ones they replaced.

Where that shows up in transactions is at the wedding itself and after. Bank of America’s card and payment data show wedding spending per customer up 8.5% year over year through May, against an average national wedding cost of $36,000 in 2025, up $3,000 from the prior year. Marriage volume recovered to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, with 34 of every 1,000 unmarried adults marrying that year. Fewer weddings, more expensive ones, sold to a narrower and better-off customer.

The takeaway for anyone selling to households is that aggregate consumer sentiment is now averaging two populations moving in opposite directions, and the smaller, wealthier one is the one feeling better about the future. Marketing built on a single American mood is measuring something that no longer exists.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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