"Looked at from that angle, the fact that marrying your best friend seems to make middle age..."

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Looked at from that angle, the fact that marrying your best friend seems to make middle age “slightly less terrible” (as the headline of the Washington Post’s coverage of the study sardonically boasts) seems less a ringing endorsement of marriage than an indictment of the way many of us spend our middle age—in socially isolated domestic units, each consumed with the nearly impossible task of balancing work and family, made bearable only by having a close friend in the trenches with us.

PERHAPS NOWHERE IS THIS more true than in the U.S., where, despite the growing diversity of our families, our economic structures and work policies stubbornly cater to two-parent partnerships—and don’t even properly support those. Granted, some of the “stresses of middle age” that can be eased by marital friendship are probably inevitable—raising a child, caring for a dying parent, or facing the first evidence of your own impending mortality, for example, will never be easy. But, in the U.S., we seem to have all but given up on the possibility that at least one key challenge of this life stage—the fact that career and family obligations often peak at the exact same time—could, conceivably, be collectively solved. Instead, we accept ever-longer work hours, stagnating wages, astronomical child care costs, and laughable family leave policies, and then find, unsurprisingly, that more than half of working parents say it is difficult for them to balance their job and home responsibilities.

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- I’m excited to be starting a regular column at Pacific Standard. Check out my first piece on a new study on the benefits of marriage.