It's almost, almost, like following God's good purpose and design in life makes your life better and more fulfilling.

The latest research from the University of Chicago shows that the best predictor of happiness for adults is not about wealth, not about prestige, and not about education.

It's all about finding a good spouse.

Married individuals are a full 30% happier than their single counterparts.

Looks like old Solomon was right:

"He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD." -Proverbs 18:22 ESV

And in Ecclesiastes:

"Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun." (9:9)

The full research is behind a paywall, but the folks at The Unherd have a pretty good analysis.

While other factors like income and education matter, they're all dwarfed in importance to finding a spouse.

"Marital status is and has been a very important marker for happiness," researcher Sam Peltzman concludes. "The happiness landslide comes entirely from the married. Low happiness characterizes all types of non-married. No subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people."

That seems pretty important!

Other factors do matter — including income, educational achievement, race, and geography — but marital status is most influential when it comes to predicting happiness in the study. "This difference is stable over time. It is about the same whether the unmarried state is due to divorce, separation, death of spouse or never having married," Peltzman says.

In a culture that encourages permanent singleness, and even churches that promote the glory of singleness, this type of study shows us that God's normative path is the best path to find favor with Him.

You will be more satisfied in life if you find a godly husband or wife.

(Other studies show that belief in God is also a major factor in overall wellness and happiness.)

What's more, he finds that happiness has fallen since the turn of the millennium, and points to marriage as the biggest driver of that decline. In his words, the "recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness".

The study shows that as fewer people get married, the happiness of the population declines.

And, the study shows, less-educated and less-wealthy individuals aren't getting married as much anymore, which is contributing to their overall sadness.

The bottom line is that the United States is increasingly riven when it comes to happiness between the haves and have-nots, in large part because record numbers of less privileged Americans are not succeeding at getting, not to mention remaining, married.

This is a good news, bad news study.

• The bad news: People are less happy than they used to be.
• The good news: We have the solution.
• The other bad news: It really is difficult to find a quality spouse in our hedonistic, self-centered culture.

We haven't trained men to be men or women to be women.

If we want the next generation to be happy, churches need to stop being backseat "At The Movies" sermon-series peddlers, train up godly men and women, and then encourage those men and women to get married while holding them accountable to their vows.

That is how you build (happy) nations.