Marriage and Happiness
Lawrence Welk dresses and correlation and causation
Once when I was little and my dad still lived with us, my parents had this rip-roaring argument during dinner about what color dresses these girls on Lawrence Welk wore. We had two televisions, both were small and the reception depended on some giant metal antenna that perched on the roof of the ranch house my dad had built 15 years before. We all peered at the black and white TV and the fuzzy picture.
“Those dresses are blue,” my mom insisted, scooping up some beef stew on a spoon. She placed the spoon in her mouth and chewed carefully. My mom was big on manners and chewing with your mouth closed, and napkins in your lap, and not talking with food behind your teeth. Still, her lipstick got on the spoon. It was a weird color in between red and hot pink. When I was little, I thought lipstick smelled like waxy cigarettes and coffee. I didn’t realize that was just the smell of my mother’s mouth.
“Red,” my dad blurted. He had food in his own mouth. He didn’t care. To him talking was more important than manners.
“Lew. Those are blue.”
“Red.”
“Blue.”
“Red.”
“Carrie, what color do you think those dresses are?” my mom asked in a gentle voice that she used when she wanted me to agree with things.
I sided with her. “Blue.”
I had no clue. I just knew I wanted my parents to stop arguing over dresses, and wanted the overly melodious voice of the Lawrence Welk women to stop singing. My mom grabbed my hand, winked at me, and said, “Let’s go see.”
We were conspirators, heading to the yellow living room with the other television set—the one that wasn’t black and white. My mom turned on the television. It took a second and then came into full-color life. The ladies still sang. Their dresses were red.
Mom winked at me and called out, “The dresses are blue, Lew.”
Even when she was wrong, she had to be right. She turned off the TV, and we went back to eating. My dad shrugged.
“They seemed red,” he said.
I didn’t realize then that they were about to divorce, that my mom was about to kick him out of the house, that their brains couldn’t let go of the stubbornness, the feeling that they had to right about everything. When my mother retold this story, she took the lie out, perpetuating the truth that she wanted to believe: that she was right and that my dad was impossibly stubborn.
For some random reason, I told one of my friends about this and he said, “Your parents watched Lawrence Welk?”
“Yeah.”
He gasped. “They made you watch Lawrence Welk?”
“Yeah.”
“That is cruel and unusual punishment right there.”
And it was, but that’s not my point. I’m not sure what my point is, but I know I have one. It has to do with perception and truth. It has to do with what we believe and what we make ourselves believe. My point is in between the lines of what happened, the white space of the page, resonating and waiting to be plucked out.
That whole scene also makes me think about marriage and happiness.
In the biweekly newsletter, The Happiness Abstract, the writers talk a bit about marriage (not the Lawrence Welk style) and it’s relationship to happiness in the September issue. It focuses on the work of Sam Peltzman, and learns that married people are happier people.
There is a disclaimer:
“This issue is therefore observational rather than prescriptive. For instance, you will discover below that married people are significantly happier than the unmarried. Does this mean that marriage produces happiness? Or are unhappier people less likely to find or want a partner? At present, the best social science cannot prove causation to these tricky questions, so the answers remain an object of interpretation.”
In his study, which looked at all kinds of happiness factors (earnings, where people lived, etc.), he found that Americans who are married are 30 points (statistically quite significant) than Americans who are not.
“The only happy people for 50 years have been married people,” Peltzman said in an interview with The Atlantic.
Yes, tell that to my parents and their Lawrence Welk arguments.
And that’s a point that social scientists make (remember that disclaimer?).
In a piece by David Lunden for Psychology Today, he writes,
“According to Huntington and colleagues, the data don’t support the contention that marriage causes health and happiness. Rather, they’re more consistent with the notion that marriage selects for these. In other words, people don’t get healthy and happy because they get married, but rather it’s the other way around. That is, healthy, happy people are more likely to get married than those who aren't, most likely because health and happiness are attractive features in a mate.”
It’s all pretty interesting. But what does it mean? I’m not sure, and the researchers aren’t sure either. I do know that not all people aren’t meant to stay married and when things are bad, when things can’t be fixed, when the dress is red or blue, it’s okay to walk away.
I loved this quote from your piece, "When I was little, I thought lipstick smelled like waxy cigarettes and coffee. I didn’t realize that was just the smell of my mother’s mouth." It is precisely the same thoughts I probably had whenever my mother decided to wear lipstick...which only really happened during the holidays...but the cigarettes and coffee - those were constant.
Thanks for putting this out there...I enjoyed it. I also thought about marriage and how my thoughts have changed over the years...