The Atlantic published a story yesterday about happiness and marriage and how there is pretty strong evidence that the two are, dare I say it, intimately related. The story is built around a chart which shows American happiness began to decline around the year 2000.

The chart comes from a recent paper by Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago. For the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Peltzman looked at the General Social Survey, which since 1972 has asked thousands of Americans, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” If you imagine this large sample as 100 people, historically about 50 of those people say they’re “pretty happy,” and that’s still true. But in the 1970s, about 35 people would say they’re “very happy,” and 15 would say “not too happy.” That began to shift around 2000, and now about 32 people say they’re “very happy” and 18 say they’re “not too happy.”…

After slicing the demographic data every which way—income, education level, race, location, age, and gender—Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing: Married people are happier, and Americans aren’t getting married as much. In 1980, 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, but today, it’s 25 percent. “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness,” he writes.

Married people are much happier than the unmarried, according to these data. Looking at those same 100 people, 40 married people will say they’re happy, and 10 will say they’re not happy. But single people are about evenly split between happy and not happy. It doesn’t really matter if you are divorced, are widowed, or have never married: If you’re not married, you’re less likely to be happy. “The only happy people for 50 years have been married people,” Peltzman told me.

One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

So is it really that simple? To be happy in life you just have to get married?

Well, maybe. As the author of the piece, Olga Khazan, points out there’s an ongoing disagreement about it. Some people really do believe marriage makes you happy. There are studies which seem to indicate a boost to happiness that lasts a couple years. There is one study of British people which found married people were happier years later than they had been before getting married.

However, there’s another way to look at this. Maybe people who are happier in the first place are more likely to get married. In other words, maybe there’s a lot of self-selection going on here. This point of view also has some research behind it. A years-long study of 24,000 Germans found married people were happier to begin with and marriage didn’t provide any clear boost to their happiness over time.

I can sort of see the arguments for both sides. On the one hand it completely makes sense that people who are less happy are less likely to marry. Who wants to marry someone who is unhappy? Why would two people who are both unhappy choose to marry each other? So it sort of makes sense that people who are generally unhappy are opting themselves out of the marriage pool which is therefore composed of happier people.

On the other hand, just because happier people are more likely to marry doesn’t prove marriage is a wash. The fact that they remained as happy as they were before might mean they were destined to always be happy no matter what but it might mean that marriage helped them maintain a happiness which otherwise would have waned over time. We just don’t know how married people’s lives would have turned out if they had stayed single.

I don’t think marriage can ever make an unhappy person happy beyond a very short time. But I do think it’s very possible that married people are better able to remain happy through the many ups and downs of adult life because they are married. This life is not something anyone should face alone if they can at all avoid it.