If You Want To Be Happy For the Rest of Your Life…

By Shlomo Maital  

    The 1963 hit song by Jimmy Soul (“If you wanta be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife…”)  is so offensive and politically incorrect, it would die today long before reaching the airwaves.

     Moreover, it is dead wrong…as I will explain later.  

     But there is research that DOES complete the sentence, “if you want to be happy for the rest of your life…”…    and it says:   find a soul mate.  Find a GOOD wife.  And yes, she CAN be pretty.

       Massive research just published in Nature – Human Behavior [1]  finds this:         

           “Depression represents a significant global public health challenge, and marital status has been recognized as a potential risk factor. However, previous investigations of this association have primarily focused on Western samples with substantial heterogeneity. Our study aimed to examine the association between marital status and depressive symptoms across countries with diverse cultural backgrounds using a large-scale, two-stage, cross-country analysis.

           “We used nationally representative, de-identified individual-level data from seven countries, including the USA, the UK, Mexico, Ireland, Korea, China and Indonesia (106,556 cross-sectional and 20,865 longitudinal participants), representing approximately 541 million adults.

          “The follow-up duration ranged from 4 to 18 years. Our analysis revealed that unmarried individuals had a higher risk of depressive symptoms than their married counterparts across all countries.”

         The other day,  I saw a dentist (periodontist).  She asked my age.  I said 81.98  (five days to my birthday).  She noted that I looked healthy and happy. I am.  I said, unprompted, I have a secret.  I have a good wife.

          Indeed I do.  My wife of 57 years is beautiful, interesting, supportive, and keeps me in line.  There are reasons to be unhappy these days in our little country Israel – but at home, none at all.  Having a spouse to love and care for is a major blessing and a significant reason to get out of bed in the morning.   

          The research I cited involved N=541,000,000!    My life is N=1.  But that N=1 is for me significant.   How about you? 

    [1] Xiaobing Zhai, Henry H. Y. Tong, Chi Kin Lam, Abao Xing, Yuyang Sha, Gang Luo, Weiyu Meng, Junfeng Li, Miao Zhou, Yangxi Huang, Ling Shing Wong, Cuicui Wang & Kefeng Li.   ” Association and causal mediation between marital status and depression in seven countries”.  Nature —  Human Behaviour.  (2024)