Americans are as unhappy as ever. Could ‘a happiness-segregated society by marriage’ be why?

For nearly 50 years, one number barely moved. Every year or two, the General Social Survey asks Americans how happy they are, and for decades the balance between “very happy” and “not too happy” held steady, from 1972 through 2018. But as soon as the pandemic hit, it came cratering down.

Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has spent several years tracking that number. “It’s a huge change,” he told Fortune. “It always can come back more, and we hope that it does. But so far, it’s like a net of minus 20, which is utterly unprecedented.”

The 2020 drop was 25 points, but the rebound has been only five points. He compared it to the last shock most Americans lived through: the Great Recession, which he said “was maximum 10 points, and came back right away.”

The first instinct is to blame money, but Peltzman says it’s not that simple. Yes, while grocery bills and gas prices have soared, blaming the affordability crisis would make sense if the unhappiest Americans were the ones getting squeezed hardest.

But Peltzman’s data says the opposite. The people who fell furthest after 2020 were the ones who had the most going ...