Essay

What Marriage Adds

Could Marriage Really Make Me Happier?

You may believe in eternal marriage and still wonder what married life would actually add to your happiness. Maybe you have watched marriages fall apart, dated for years without finding the right person, or heard marriage described mostly in terms of sacrifice, stress, money, and responsibility. You may be asking, how am I supposed to feel confident about marriage when I have seen so many examples that make me nervous about it?

Those are real questions, and a lot of young adults feel the same way, even if they don’t always say it out loud. Marriage isn’t some magic switch that automatically makes life happy, and just getting married doesn’t guarantee everything will suddenly fall into place. But the gospel teaches something more hopeful than that. A loving, covenant marriage between a man and a woman is part of God’s plan for your happiness, and learning how to build that kind of relationship can become one of the most meaningful sources of joy, growth, real connection, and lasting purpose in your life.

Marriage Is Part of God’s Plan of Happiness

The Family: A Proclamation to the World begins with a clear statement: “Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and…the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”

That means marriage is not just about finding someone to date forever or “settling down” someday when life finally feels figured out. It’s tied to something bigger than your current stage of life, your relationship status, or even your career plans. It connects to why you are here in the first place.

Before you came to earth, you lived as a son or daughter of heavenly parents. You came here to receive a physical body, make choices, learn from both good and hard experiences, and grow into someone more like Them through Jesus Christ. In that process, God designed marriage and family as a way for us to learn some of the deepest lessons about love, patience, sacrifice, forgiveness, and joy in relationships that actually last.

That’s why, in God’s plan, marriage isn’t just about companionship in the “we hang out and do life together” sense, though that matters too. It’s about covenant partnership—two people choosing to build something sacred together, to raise children in faith if they are able, and to create a home where love and discipleship can grow. And for those who are sealed in the temple, those relationships are meant to continue beyond death, not end with it.

Paul taught early Christians that “neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:11). In other words, men and women are meant to work together in God’s plan. For Latter-day Saints, that idea stretches beyond just “life partnership” and points toward eternity: becoming like our Heavenly Parents is deeply connected to covenant relationships.

This is part of why the proclamation calls God’s design the “divine plan of happiness.” God isn’t just trying to help you survive adulthood or avoid loneliness. He is inviting you into a way of life where real, lasting joy is found through relationships—especially the kind of committed, Christ-centered relationships that shape who you become over time.

What If I’m Dating and Worried About Marriage?

You may want marriage very much and still feel afraid of it. Maybe dating has left you discouraged. Or perhaps you have a good relationship now, but the closer marriage becomes, the more you find yourself wondering whether you are making a terrible mistake.

Some concerns really are warnings that need attention. You should take things like incompatibility, dishonesty, abuse, coercion, addiction, or serious ongoing conflict seriously—and you should also pay attention to genuine spiritual impressions.

But not every feeling of fear is revelation. Sometimes fear is simply what it feels like to stand at the edge of a big, meaningful decision that requires trust and vulnerability:

What If the Marriage You Saw Makes You Afraid of Your Own?

Sometimes fear of marriage comes directly from what you have already lived through. If your parents divorced, your home was unstable, or you watched marriage cause years of pain, you may believe deeply in eternal families and still wonder whether a happy marriage could actually work for you.

Nathan Wood experienced that kind of fear:

“Coming home to a broken family was the hardest thing for me. It left me traumatized for over two years to where I wanted nothing to do with eternal marriage. However, I made the decision to go to BYU-Idaho to try to find my faith because I felt like I lost it.“Time passed and a few months later, I found out Elder Bednar was coming to BYU-I for a devotional. I remembered before the devotional, I prayed, ‘Heavenly Father, what would you have me learn from Thine Apostle?’ Elder and Sister Bednar then talked about eternal marriage and I started listening when they mentioned people my age who went through similar struggles of broken families. “The two things that hit me were, ‘You do not find the marriage you hope to have. You create it!’ And Sister Bednar made a triangle with her hands and put the husband in one corner, the wife in the other, and Christ at the top. I then realized that an eternal marriage can work for me if I center and build it on the Savior. “Elder Bednar then invoked a blessing upon all of us at that devotional that we could know and realize that eternal marriage is for us. My life and my faith were saved that day. Fast forward a year later, I am still looking for my eternal companion, but I have never been more happier as I try every day to center my life on Christ!”

“Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence”

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s counsel to young adults who have fears about marriage is especially helpful when a good decision begins to feel frightening. In “Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence,” he taught:

“Beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing.”

Elder Holland specifically acknowledges that you can pray for years to find someone and then panic when you actually do. You can receive spiritual confidence about a relationship and later begin imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. You can deeply want eternal marriage and still feel nervous when marriage asks you to give up some independence.

But feeling fear does not automatically mean you haven’t received revelation.

Why Opposition Can Become Strong Around Good Things

Once you understand the purpose of marriage, Elder Holland’s warning about opposition makes more sense.

God is leading His children toward covenant relationships, eternal marriage, and family. Satan has no interest in helping you create relationships that bring you closer to Christ and bind generations together. Sometimes his influence appears through obvious things such as selfishness, pornography, dishonesty, resentment, or treating people as disposable.

At other times, discouragement can work more quietly. Fear can grow until commitment itself begins to look dangerous. You may start believing that you need certainty about every possible future outcome before you can move forward. Or the failed marriages you have witnessed may begin to feel like predictions about your own future.

Not every anxious feeling comes from Satan. Mortal minds experience uncertainty, and wisdom requires careful judgment. Elder Holland’s counsel is to be careful that fear does not make you discard genuine spiritual light you have already received.

What Does the Research Show?

Research helps us see something similar in everyday life. In this clip, BYU professor and family scholar Jenet Jacob Erickson discusses research on marriage and happiness:

One striking finding comes from W. Bradford Wilcox’s analysis of General Social Survey data. He found that “being married increased the odds of happiness by 151% — and a very happy marriage increased the odds of happiness by 545%.” His larger point is important: marital quality was more strongly associated with overall happiness than education, income, or job satisfaction. (Read more about the research through BYU.)

That finding should not be read as a promise that getting married automatically produces happiness. The significant difference appears in good marriages. The quality of the relationship matters enormously.

A Happy Marriage Is Something You Build

That distinction fits remarkably well with the family proclamation. It does not teach that successful marriages simply happen once two compatible people find each other.

It says successful marriages are “established and maintained” through faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. Those words describe habits practiced over years between two imperfect people.

Notice that the list includes repentance, forgiveness, and work. God never promised that covenant marriage would be effortless. Instead, He teaches husbands and wives how to bring Jesus Christ into a relationship in which both people are still learning.

This is where Elder Bednar’s counsel to Nathan becomes especially meaningful: “You do not find the marriage you hope to have. You create it.” A happy marriage is not simply something you discover because you happened to choose the one person with whom life will always be easy. It is something two faithful people gradually build as they both turn toward Jesus Christ.

Much of marriage’s happiness can grow there—not simply from finding someone who makes you happy all the time, but from gradually learning with another person how to love, forgive, sacrifice, receive love, and become more like Christ.

What If I’m Still Single?

None of this means you should panic about being unmarried or treat marriage as the only way you can experience happiness now.

You can have a deeply meaningful, joyful, covenant-centered life while single. Your relationship with Jesus Christ is real now. Your covenants are real now. Your ability to serve, love, learn, build relationships, worship in the temple, and become more like Heavenly Father is real now.

Nathan’s experience illustrates that too. His growing hope about marriage did not depend on immediately finding someone to marry. He first learned that his future could be different because he could center his own life on Christ now.

The Lord also knows the difference between blessings you reject and blessings you faithfully desire but cannot presently obtain. No faithful person will ultimately lose eternal blessings because circumstances outside his or her control prevented marriage in mortality.

So pursuing marriage faithfully is very different from becoming desperate about marriage. You do not need to force a relationship because you are afraid of being left behind. But you also do not need to let painful family experiences, cultural pessimism, or fear convince you that the kind of marriage God describes is not worth seeking.

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• When I picture marriage, where did that picture come from? How much has been shaped by my family, social media, divorces I have witnessed, or healthy couples I know?
• Have I begun treating someone else’s unhappy marriage as evidence of what my own future marriage would have to become?
• If I am dating someone seriously, are my concerns pointing to actual problems that need attention, or am I frightened because lasting commitment requires faith?
• What might change if I thought less about finding a perfect marriage and more about becoming someone prepared to create a Christ-centered marriage?
• What qualities in the family proclamation—faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, and work—could I begin developing now?

What Can You Do This Week?

Listen to Elder Holland’s “Cast Not Away Therefore Your Confidence.” Think about whether fear is making you distrust spiritual direction you previously received.

If your fear of marriage is connected to what happened in your own family, talk honestly with Heavenly Father about that. Ask Him to help you separate what you experienced from what He is inviting you to build. You may also benefit from talking with trusted people, learning healthier relationship patterns, or seeking professional help if wounds from your family continue to shape your expectations.

If you are dating seriously, have one honest conversation about what you each believe marriage is for. Talk about faith, children, money, work, temple covenants, family relationships, and the kind of home you hope to create. Confidence grows from knowing someone deeply and seeking revelation, not from avoiding difficult questions.

God’s plan does not promise a marriage without sacrifice or uncertainty. He offers something better: the possibility of a covenant relationship in which a man and woman learn, over time and through Jesus Christ, to love each other more deeply, build a family together, and become more like their Heavenly Parents. Whatever marriage you have seen before, Christ can help you prepare to build something faithful, healthy, and deeply joyful with Him at the center.