Unmarried Women with No Kids Are the 'Healthiest and Happiest, says expert

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62. Data on the contrasted life spans

of married men vs single men and married women vs single women have been available for a long time.

The general consensus has been that marriage does confer certain health benefits on men while leveling extra stressors on women.

Measuring the concept of "happiness" has always been problematic. No outsider can really grasp what goes on in another marriage or household, to say nothing about knowing another person's heart.

I do agree that having children is no guarantee of not ending up essentially alone during the latter years of one's life. At the risk of being cynical, money and an ethical lawyer are the probably the best predictors of being treated well during those vulnerable years.

That being said, we do need each other, in varying degrees and in different ways. And both "emotional labor" and unpaid domestic labor keep the world going in ways that politicians and business leaders and economists can never properly measure.