In general, marriage in young adulthood is not detrimental to mental health. Being in any sort of relationship is good for psychological distress, being married or engaged to be married curbs drunkenness, and married young adults, especially those who marry at ages 22 to 26, are more satisfied with their lives. These findings suggest that marriage's mental health benefits are apparent, at least in many ways, among young adults who have married at a relatively early age.

Finally, and importantly, this study cannot speak to the long-term effect of an early marital transition, only relatively short-term effects. Given longer exposure to the difficulties associated with early marriage, those who marry early may exhibit higher levels of mental health problems as they age. Furthermore, using a sample with a restricted age range such as this makes it difficult to reject the hypothesis that early marriage confers mental health benefits because these individuals are still in a "honeymoon" phase of their relationship

These results corroborate the findings of several other studies that suggest perhaps "the future of marriage has arrived" (e.g., Williams 2003) in terms of converging gendered effects of marriage on mental health

Individuals' immediate social context, including both structural (e.g., neighborhood disadvantage) and cultural (e.g., local age norms) factors, may buffer or exacerbate the effect of marriage on mental health (Clarke and Wheaton 2005). The conclusion that social approval explains some of the age-at-marriage effect on life satisfaction could be further tested to see whether this effect is more or less present in contexts where early marriage is more or less affirmed

Perhaps the best mediators of those tested are relationship stability, measured here by the number of sex partners in the last year, and self-image. Not having multiple sex partners (which indicates relationship stability) explains almost 30 percent of married young adults' psychological distress advantage over single young adults. Exiting relationships can lead to psychological distress among young adults (Simon and Barrett 2010), and marriage, though not indissoluble, buffers many young adults from that distress. More positive self-image explains the rest of the married individuals' lower psychological distress compared with single individuals and about 23 percent of engaged daters' lower psychological distress (compared with married young adults). Still, self-image is less helpful in explaining differences in frequency of drunkenness (for which parenthood may be a key factor) and life satisfaction. In the end, marriage's effects are often robust to these selection factors and mediating variables

This study has also tested a number of potential mechanisms that may explain the relationship between marriage in young adulthood and mental health.

Although teenage marriers have more psychological distress than those who married at ages 22 to 26, this difference is the result of selection and not causation. Only in terms of life satisfaction do more "on-time" (though still early) marriers outpace teenage marriers and those who marry at age 20 or 21. Waiting until later to marry may do little good in terms of avoiding mental health problems but much good in terms of improving overall well-being. This latter finding suggests social approval for marriage, which is likely higher for those marrying at ages 22 to 26 than for those marrying earlier, may be a key mechanism explaining marriage's effect on overall well-being.

Married young adults are much more satisfied with their lives than are other young adults (with the possible exception of engaged cohabitors). The marriage premium for life satisfaction is strong and robust to a number of potentially explanatory factors, including selection, socioeconomic status, parenthood, relationship stability, religious participation, and psychological gains. Married young adults are likely benefiting from the emotional and social support that accompanies marriage (with its heightened social attachment) and that has not been gauged adequately by this study's measures. Marriage may also provide a degree of certainty, finality, and sense of satisfaction deriving from "accomplishing" one of the tasks involved in the transition to adulthood, the task some consider the capstone to adulthood (Cherlin 2004). Those who have not married may still experience anxiety about locating and securing a lifelong (ideally, at least) partner

Married young adults get drunk less frequently than single ones and those who are not engaged. Engaged young adults, both cohabiting and not, look similar to married young adults in this regard. Engaged young adults may be curbing their drinking habits as they prepare for their transition to marriage. Marriage and engagement likely carry with them a heightened sense of responsibility and obligation and a less active social calendar, which leads to less drunkenness

In terms of psychological distress, marriage's benefits are limited but not absent. Married young adults have lower psychological distress than single young adults, but they do not have a clear advantage over young adults in any other type of romantic relationship. In fact, young adults who are engaged and not cohabiting have lower levels of distress than married young adults. This may be the result of their more normative and socially approved transition to adulthood and may also reflect the excitement of an impending wedding and new marriage.

in the final model, all groups except those who first married at age 20 or 21 report significantly lower life satisfaction than those who first married at ages 22 to 26.

There is a clear association between marriage and higher life satisfaction (compared with all other groups) in these models

Engaged daters and engaged cohabitors resemble ever married individuals in their drinking behavior, a finding that is consistent across all models in Table 3

According to model 1, singles and unengaged daters get drunk at more than twice the rate of ever married individuals, and unengaged cohabitors get drunk at about 1.80 times the rate, net of controls.

These findings suggest that no group fares significantly better in terms of psychological distress than those who married for the first time at ages 22 to 26. Two groups, however, report more psychological distress than those who married at ages 22 to 26: singles and teenage marriers.

deleterious effects

once prior psychological distress is considered, single young adults have higher psychological distress than ever married young adults. This suggests (and ancillary analyses confirm) that respondents with higher levels of psychological distress are more likely to select into marriage than to be single.

This iterative approach allows me to assess the impact of each set of mediators on the relationship status effects.

Engaged daters display less psychological distress than ever married individuals in all six models, though this is explained somewhat by selection (engaged daters had lower wave 1 CES-D scores than ever married individuals), socioeconomic differences (engaged daters are more highly educated than ever married individuals), and self-image (engaged daters have more positive self-images than ever married individuals).

Panels B of Tables 2 to 4 examine the influence of age at first marriage.

I control for a continuous measure of age in years, gender, living in the South, urbanicity, race, body mass index classification, the interviewer reports of the respondents' physical attractiveness and the attractiveness of their personality, and their employment status. All controls are measured at wave 3 except for gender, region, urbanicity, and race, which are wave 1 measures. Descriptive statistics for all variables are listed in Table 1

four-item index tapping respondents' self-image at wave 3. The items in the index measure respondents' agreement (from 1 = "strongly disagree" to 5 = "strongly agree") that they (1) have many good qualities, (2) have a lot to be proud of, (3) like themselves just the way they are, and (4) are doing things just about right. The summed index ranges from 4 to 20 and has an α coefficient of .86

To test how marriage may affect mental health through relationship stability,

Parenthood

Socioeconomic factors

Explanatory variables. I test how several variables may explain the association between marriage and mental health. To begin, I include wave 1 mental health measures (although there is no comparable wave 1 life satisfaction measure). The wave 1 CES-D measure is a 19-item index and has an α coefficient of .87. The wave 1 measure for frequency of drunkenness is nearly identical to the wave 3 measure and is coded the same way.

I create three categories for age at first marriage: married as a teenager, married at ages 20 or 21, and married at ages 22 to 26.

The key independent variable for this study is the relationship status of the respondent at wave 3. I divide respondents into six relationship categories: single, unengaged daters, engaged daters, unengaged cohabitors, engaged cohabitors, and ever married.

All respondents were asked, "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?"

psychological distress over the prior week

frequency of drunkenness over the past year

Dependent variables. For this study, I analyze three dependent variables: (1) psychological distress, (2) frequency of drunkenness, and (3) life satisfaction

The data for this study come from waves 1 and 3 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and 23 other federal agencies. It is a school-based panel study of health-related behaviors and their causes, with emphasis placed on social context and social networks. Wave 1 was conducted in 1994 and 1995 and consisted of indepth interviews with 20,745 American youth in grades 7 to 12. The 132 schools included in the study were chosen from a sampling frame of U.S. high schools and were nationally representative with respect to size, urbanicity, ethnicity, type (e.g., public, private, religious), and region. Because the study is school based, it does not represent those who had dropped out of school at wave 1. Wave 3 was conducted in 2001 and 2002, when respondents were 18 to 28 years old, and consisted of interviews with 15,197 of the wave 1 respondents. For this study, I restrict the sample to those who were unmarried at wave 1, participated in the detailed relationship inventory, and have a valid sample weight (n = 11,695)

Psychological benefits. Marriage may provide a number of psychological benefits. Marriage may provide enhanced feelings of meaning and purpose, an improved sense of self, and a heightened sense of mastery (Bierman et al. 2006; Marks 1996). However, in young adulthood, many of these psychological benefits may not be restricted to marriage, as other types of relationships are more normative at this time. Young adults receive a valued social identity, self-worth, and social integration not just from marriage but from nonmarital romantic relationships as well (Simon and Barrett 2010). Moreover, many of marriage's benefits may stem from social approval of the relationship (Marks 1996), which may not apply in many contexts in which early marriage is viewed as unwise. Thus, it is not clear whether married young adults reap these benefits in the same way as other married adults.

Of course, early marriages are notoriously unstable. Their short-term survival, however, is somewhat high: 78 percent of women's teenage marriages last at least three years, as do 86 percent of those begun in the early 20s (men's three-year marital survival rates are 64 percent for teenage marriers and 84 percent for marriages commenced in their early 20s; Goodwin, Mosher, and Chandra 2010). Relationship stability may help explain a positive effect of marriage on young adults' mental health, but it would likely suppress a negative effect.

Given that fertility remains higher among married women despite the dramatic rise in nonmarital childbearing (Martin et al. 2010), parenthood may explain a negative effect of marriage on young adults' mental health or suppress a positive effect on mental health

Therefore, whether because of selection or causation, heightened socioeconomic resources are unlikely to underlie any positive effect of marriage on mental health among early marriers, but they may help explain a negative effect of marriage on mental health among young adults who have married.

Early marriage may be selective of individuals with poorer mental health. Forthofer et al. (1996) found that psychiatric disorders were positively associated with marriage before age 19, though the effects were weak and not often statistically significant. Still, they argued that there may be some validity to the argument that distressed individuals marry early to escape difficult circumstances.

In other words, married people do not have better mental health because they are married; rather, people with better mental health are the ones who get married. Although many other longitudinal studies find no evidence of selection into marriage by prior mental health (Kim and McHenry 2002; Lamb et al. 2003; Simon 2002), selection remains a plausible explanation for this relationship.

The causal relationship between marriage and mental health is usually explained by marital resources- economic, social, and psychological-and by relational stability or the absence of stress from breakups. Selection into marriage by those with fewer mental health problems may also be part of the explanation. These explanations are more or less relevant for the mental health of married young adults. There are several potential explanations for why marriage may improve or impede the mental health of young adults in particular.

research suggests that psychological well-being is composed of both positive affect and the absence of distress (Ryff and Keyes 1995; Williams 2003). Focusing attention on one or the other of these components may fail to capture the full effect of marriage on mental health.

The typical approach in the marriage and mental health literature has been to examine internalizing problems, usually measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and externalizing problems, measured by substance (especially alcohol) use and abuse. These measures have proven valuable, especially to scholars who are interested in gender differences in the effect of marriage on mental health, because women tend to internalize and men tend to externalize their mental health problems.

Among 18- to 25-yearolds, just 20 percent are married, 25 percent are not in relationships, 20 percent are cohabiting, and 35 percent are dating (Scott et al. 2011)

The mental health advantages accrue as individuals move from less attachment to more attachment, and thus marriage has the most benefits. Relatedly, Simon and Barrett (2010) found that young adults who are in romantic relationships have better mental health than those not in relationships, in part because relationships provide social integration and heightened feelings of self-worth and in part because those in relationships are less likely to have experienced recent breakups.

salutary

"The relationships between marriage and cohabitation with health during the transition to adulthood are not well understood despite substantial research on marriage and health, and increasing attention to health during the transition to adulthood"

Thus, those who transition to marriage at an early age-especially those who marry in their teens, but also those who marry in their early 20s-may be less likely to enjoy positive mental health benefits from marriage. Early marriages are notorious for their relatively low survival rates (Lehrer 2008), which suggests that early marriages may be distinct from later marriages in terms of marital quality and may not confer the same mental health benefits. Moreover, the benefits of marriage's social approval (Marks 1996) may not extend to those who marry young and receive less societal support.

In some cases, "the timing of an event may be more consequential than its occurrence" (Elder 1995:114). This may be especially true for marriage, for which most agree there is a culturally appropriate time to marry (Settersten and Hägestad 1996). In particular, it has become increasingly nonnormative (both statistically and culturally) to marry at early ages.

internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and subjective well-being

I compare the mental health of ever married young adults to fine-grained categories of never married young adults: singles, unengaged daters, engaged daters, unengaged cohabitors, and engaged cohabitors.

(1) What is the effect of marriage on mental health, vis-à-vis other relationship circumstances, in young adulthood? (2) Does the effect differ by domain of mental health? (3) Does the effect vary by age at first marriage? and (4) What explains the effect?

Moreover, other recent evidence suggests that it is important for research on marriage and mental health to specify the relationship circumstances of unmarried adults, with the recognition that they are a heterogeneous group with different levels of social support, resources, and relationship stability (Bierman, Fazio, and Milkie 2006). Not only is it important to make these relationship distinctions, but so too, according to Bierman et al. (2006), is it important to map the domains of mental health that marriage affects (and in what ways). Marriage may have different effects on internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and subjective well-being

For some, marriage may be unrelated to mental health or even harmful to it. Marital timing may be one important contingency of the marriage and mental health relationship. Particularly, marriage at an early, nonnormative age may not be as salutary as marriage at a more culturally appropriate age (Williams and Umberson 2004).

I find that married young adults exhibit levels of psychological distress that are similar to those of young adults in any kind of romantic relationship. Married and engaged young adults also report lower frequency of drunkenness than those who are not in a romantic relationship. Married young adults, especially those who first married at ages 22 to 26, report higher life satisfaction than those in other type of romantic relationships, those in no romantic relationship, and those who married prior to age 22.

nd. Also, it could be argued thatthe sample used in this study might be influenced by selection eff

. Future studies are needed to more fully understand if there is a more complex interac-tion between gender and levels of religiosity than is indicated in this s

t appears that being a highly religious person is asso-ciated with more stability and satisfaction with close relationships. This may be associat-ed with living according to a spiritually-oriented code, being together as a family in reli-gious worship, sharing in a common purpose, and hearing weekly reminders of Christianvalues

, and perceive themselves as being moreready for marriage. These differences likely reflect particularistic LDS theology whichstresses the eternal nature of marriage and family relation

ct the benefits of being highly committed to aspiritual lifestyle. This is consistent with past research that has found that highly religiousmarriages and families are happier, more successful, larger, and are more likely to avoiddivorce, substance abuse, and sexual promisc

an Americans. In this study, as in omore differences between Latter-day Saints and others in the area of attitthan in behaviors

Readiness for

Readiness for M

ants (15 of them). In allmales and females found the mgrou

The means shown in Table 3 demonstrate that highly religioussignificantly different on all premarital values and marital expectaiated individuals. Also, the highly religious Latter-day Saint msignificantly from the traditional Christians in 95% of the comgious LDS males and females were significantly different from tin all cases, except for the comparison with highly religious Csure of desired autono

Because the focus of this particular study was on how Latter-day Saints compare to othergroups, statistical significance of the differences between highly religious Catholics andProtestants, and non-affiliated individuals are not reported

Participants generally completed the PREP-M Questionnaire as part of a universitylege class experience, a premarital workshop group, or a premarital counseling sessEach member of the couple completed the answer sheet

1) Premarital Values andMarital Role Expectations, 2) Beliefs about Marriage and the Family, and 3) Personal andRelationship Characteristics.

This preponderance of Latter-day Saints was the result of the research questionnaire being used heavily at BrighamYoung University, an LDS Church owned institution. In order to create groups of compa-rable size, random sub-samples of approximately 20% of the highly religious Latter-daySaints were drawn, resulting in sample sizes of 274 LDS males and 292 LDS females

The "highly reli-gious" in this study include those who responded "strongly agree," the highest categoryon a five point scale, to each of the following three items: 1) Religion is an important partof my life; 2) I do not see myself as a religious person (reverse coded); and 3) Going toreligious services is important to me. Also used as a criteria for this measure was the item,"How frequently do I attend religious services?" Only respondents who answered "regu-lar attendance (weekly)", again, the highest category on a five point scale, were retainedin this study

f 204 ite

oung adults w

given the LDS Church's emphasis on the importance of marriageand family life, and its particularistic doctrines that family relationships can be perpetuat-ed beyond the grave (Proclamation 1995), it was anticipated that devout Latter-day Saintswould hold beliefs and report behaviors that were significantly different from not only thenon-affiliated individuals, but also from their traditional Christian counterparts in someinstances.

The purpose of this study was to compare a large sample of highly religious Latter-daySaints to groups of highly religious traditional Christians (Catholics and Protestants) intheir values, attitudes, beliefs, and reported behaviors pertaining to marriage and familylife.

Third, Latter-day Saintfamilies are substantially larger than the national aver-age (Albrecht 1989; Heaton 1988). Latter-day Saints have fertility rates higherthan the national average. Utah (comprised of approximately 70% LDS) has tra-ditionally held the highestfertility rate of any state in the Union (H

Second, Latter-day Saints are more likely to marry than others. Not only arethey more likely to marry, but Latter-day Saints also marry younger and are lesslikely to divorce than the average American

First, Latter-day Saints have been shown to be more conservative in their sex-ual behavior. Latter-day Saints report lower than the national averages of pre-marital sexual experience, teenage pregnancy, and extramarital sexual experi-ence (Duke 1995; Heaton 1988; Miller, Christensen, and Olson 1987; Miller andOlson 1988).

2000

ourth, studies have found that Latter-day Saints tend to believe in more tra-ditional role definitions between husbands and wives (H

ne of these studies controlled for levelof religiosity in their comparisons. Th