The Marriage Benefit

Marriage, it turns out, is not a bad thing to have going for you in retirement. You'll probably be wealthier and longer-lived. The studies reported in this issue suggest that the erosion of marriage carries a price for both individuals and society:

• Married people live longer than the unmarried, but the effects vary by sex. For men, the effect is especially strong and takes hold immediately--apparently because men engage in more risky behaviors outside marriage than do women. For women, the benefit comes almost entirely from the improved economic status that marriage brings (Lillard and Waite, 1995).

• When marriage ends because of divorce or a spouse's death, men are at as great a risk of dying as they were before marriage. The same is true for divorced women--but not for widows, perhaps because widows usually keep more of the family's assets than divorced women do (Lillard and Waite, 1995).

• Married couples save more than the unmarried--and not just because two incomes are involved. Simply "coupling" the savings of separated, divorced, widowed or never-married individuals would not equal the savings of married people. Although married couples have higher incomes, this differential accounts for only 28 percent of the savings disparity (Smith, 1995).

• In retirement, married couples benefit far more from Social Security than single people, especially if only one spouse worked. Over their retirement years, each member of a one-earner couple receives from $22,000 (for low-wage earners) to $82,000 (for high-wage earners) more than their unmarried counterparts (Panis and Lillard, 1996).

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