I'd like to see a control on this. Is there a group of people who thought they were married, but by bureaucratic snafu actually weren't? Did they have different outcomes than people who were really married?

Widows/ers would also be a good control.

Widows/ers may have some associated confounding factors

I'm sorry to be off-topic but widows/ers just hurts my eyes. Why not use a more elegant alternative, widow(er)s? Even the uglier widow(s|ers) would be better.

Or the gender neutral, invariant noun: “widowen”

BTW, shouldn’t “widower” be the person who died and the survivor be called “widowee”?

That may seem reasonable but widower is a man whose spouse died. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/widower

“Etymology Middle English widewer, alteration of wedow widow, widower, from Old English wuduwa widower; akin to Old English wuduwe widow”

> Old English wuduwa

It's one of these more universal words of Indo-European origin: https://ids.clld.org/parameters/2-770#2/14.4/149.7

I'm sure there's a style guide out there that would suggest using "The widowed."

we have a concept in welfare and income stats called equivalisation.

this is where we try to control for the positive material externalities that come from sharing resources among people. you dont have to buy two of everything if you share, it's cheaper to add a room than obtain a whole house and duplicate bathrooms + kitchens etc.

widows would fall afoul of this (in the sense that they've lived with that advantage for most of their lives), as well as obtain a likely wealth effect from inheritance, but it wouldn't surprise me if the entirity or majority of the marriage effect is largely just a restatement of equivalisation + social transfers/safety nets.

I think that having two adult role models to give a child love, and to serve as an example of 'how to have good interactions with others' is also quite important.

I was a child of divorce, and honestly it was a bit traumatizing. My parents were (and still are) often quite angry, mean and dishonest. They spent literally over $100,000 on legal fees, but "didn't have the money" to buy me a guitar.

So despite being (relatively) well off, coming from a violent, if not outright abusive at times household, suffering from parental neglect... yeah honestly that may have contributed to things like "skipping class to do drugs".

I think there's a lot of socializing that can happen in a functional two parent household that doesn't happen in single parent households, and this may be an additional advantage, in addition to equivalisation + social transfers/safety nets.

Plus as previous comments have said, if your parent has the trait "functional, responsible adult capable of having healthy relationships", that probably really increases your outcomes.

My experience is similar to yours, especially the mean and dishonest part; your parents did not have money for a guitar, mine did not have money to pay for university. The worst is that since they were both way above the income level needed to have government support (grant/scholarship, access to subsidized housing, etc) the only way I could have done it was to leave my parents as soon as I got adult age (emancipation). They still give little care about what we do (I have younger brother) and still shit on each other and are still very much fighting with money. I learned the other day that almost 20 years lates they are still fighting for the split of 75K with another 75K in unresolved state. I think we really ought to have laws that make people pay for their children if they separate. Like a untouchable fund that has to be filled up depending on the income level of the parents and that can be used later on to fund studies or life starting costs. To be honest I think my father would have made the right thing, but it is my mother who orchestrated the whole thing and left us to rot after leaving will all the stuff plus all the money. It is extremely unpopular opinion but my experience tell me that women shouldn't be allowed so much latitude considering all little real responsibility they are given and how little social cost they will have to pay for it...

If there are effects of marriage, it seems fairly obvious that they are due to the explicit commitment that the two people have made to each other, not the government’s tickbox.

Are you actually confused by this concept?

Let's tone down the aggressive comments please.

One large barrier to breakup is how much damage a breakup will do and how much effort it entails.

If a break up is very easy then small insults will lead to break up.

A marriage contract is.. a legal contract; thereby it can be a barrier to a break up.

I have considered breaking up with my girlfriend before yet the effort of splitting our things and ensuring that she has a nice continuation of a place to live comfortably has caused me to reevaluate if the reasons I want to break up are good enough. That's all the parent was suggesting. Does the marriage contract have any bearing on keeping people together.

In the US, only marriages are registered with the government. So you can’t really count long-term relationships or even common-law marriages.

That’s probably why that’s all they’re looking at. It’s the only thing that can be measured as a proxy for stable relationships.

The effect you describe could be sufficiently studied by comparing married partners to unmarried long term partners.

Not the ridiculous idea of people who thought they were married but were apparently not due to some technicality or bureaucratic error which they were not aware of.