American Happiness Hasn't Recovered Since 2020, and Marriage Is the Dividing Line

Americans are still less happy than they were before 2020, and the recovery has stalled out far short of where it started.

That's the finding from Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, who has spent years tracking the General Social Survey's happiness numbers. The survey asks a simple question: are you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy? For nearly 50 years, from 1972 through 2018, the net balance between "very happy" and "not too happy" barely budged, according to Fortune's interview with Peltzman.

Then 2020 hit. The net happiness score dropped 25 points. Five years or so later, it has recovered only about five of those points, leaving the country roughly 20 points below its pre-pandemic baseline. Peltzman called that a net change of minus 20 and described it to Fortune as "utterly unprecedented."

For comparison, he pointed to the Great Recession, the 2008 financial crisis that gutted household wealth and threw millions out of work. That shock only moved the happiness needle about 10 points, and it recovered quickly. Whatever hit the country starting in 2020 did roughly twice the damage, and the country has not shaken it off.

The affordability story doesn't hold up

The obvious explanation is money. Grocery prices are up. Gas prices have swung wildly. Rent has outpaced wages in many metro areas for years. It would make intuitive sense if the people getting squeezed hardest financially were also the ones reporting the biggest happiness losses.

But Peltzman's data says the opposite happened. The Americans who fell furthest in happiness after 2020 were white, high-income, college-educated, and right-leaning, according to Peltzman's research. These are not the demographic groups typically described as bearing the worst of an affordability crisis.

"The affordability business is not an upper-income kind of concern," Peltzman told Fortune. "It's a lower-income kind of concern, and the upper-income people have been hit hardest in the happiness crash."

He was direct about what that means for the inequality-driven explanation many commentators reach for. "Any story which says that it's inequality," he said, "those kind of stories are not consistent with the facts." Peltzman isn't claiming money doesn't matter to anyone, only that it doesn't explain why the group with the most financial cushion suffered the steepest happiness decline.

Married versus unmarried, and it's not close

The sharper divide in Peltzman's data is marital status. Married Americans remain net happy. Unmarried Americans, who make up about 45% of American adults, are now net unhappy, according to Peltzman.

"The only people who are positive, where there's a clear positive balance in happiness, are married people," he told Fortune. "We have a happiness-segregated society by marriage."

A reasonable skeptic would ask whether this is just the marriage rate itself declining, dragging down the national average as fewer people get the reported benefits of marriage. That's a legitimate question, and Peltzman's own earlier research found exactly that dynamic at work for decades. Marriage rates fell steadily from the 1970s through the early 2000s, and in an earlier paper, Peltzman attributed most of the pre-pandemic happiness decline to that shift.

But that explanation doesn't fit the 2020 crash. The marriage rate hasn't moved in 15 years. It's sat at roughly 55% married, 45% unmarried, and stayed there, Peltzman said. Whatever hit the country in 2020 hit a population whose married-unmarried split was already locked in. The mix of married and unmarried Americans going into the pandemic is the same mix today.

What changed is how each group experienced the years since. Married respondents' happiness score went from roughly +30 to +50. Unmarried respondents went from near breakeven to about -15, according to Peltzman's tracking. Both groups took a hit. The unmarried group, if anything, took a bit more of one.

Peltzman was careful to note the limits of his own findings. "You can't infer what's causing what," he told Fortune. Correlation between marital status and happiness resilience is not the same as marriage causing that resilience. People who are already more stable, financially or otherwise, may be more likely to marry and stay married in the first place.

Still, Peltzman's 2025 paper, "The Anatomy of Marital Happiness," found the marital happiness premium holds across nearly every demographic group he tested, not just among the wealthy or the college-educated.

What's left unresolved is the mechanism. Something happened starting in 2020, something bigger than a recession, that hit high-income and college-educated Americans hardest and that unmarried Americans have not recovered from at anywhere near the rate married Americans have. Peltzman's data documents the pattern in detail. It does not yet explain the cause, and no consensus explanation has emerged from the research he's published so far.