That's not enough data to form any conclusions though, correlation is not causation. A lot of work has gone into trying to disambiguate "does marriage make peop

That's not enough data to form any conclusions though, correlation is not causation. A lot of work has gone into trying to disambiguate "does marriage make people happy, or are happy people likelier to get (and stay) married?" but there is no clear answer yet. Remember that if unhappy people are more likely to divorce or never marry, this has a double-whammy effect on the average happiness gap: the unmarried person pool gets unhappier because of the new person, and the "married person" pool gets happier on average because of a survivorship bias after the unhappy person was taken out. This happens even if marriage has no effect on happiness.