"The phrase 'All the good ones are taken' is usually ascribed to lovelorn women. But if you're in your 20's, single, straight and looking for love, the statistical odds of finding a full-time partner are better if you're a woman. Unless you're a black woman.

People are attracted to one another for lots of reasons, of course, but numbers count, too. And while sex ratios vary by place, nationwide the Census Bureau calculates that among single non-Hispanic whites in their 20's, there are 120 men for every 100 women. The comparable figures are 153 Hispanic men, 132 Asian men and 92 black men for every 100 single women in their 20's of the same race or ethnicity.

Overall, there are 120 men in their 20's who have never been married, widowed or divorced for every 100 women in the same category.

...The median age for first marriages was 25.8 for women and 27.4 for men in 2004, the highest on record."

"In pursuing love, electronic communication allows us to be more reckless, fake, distracted, and isolated than ever before.

According to the personal accounts I've read, men and women today are apt to plunge into love affairs via text message, cut them off by PowerPoint, lie about who they are and what they want in forums and blogs and online dating sites, pretend they're young when they're old and old when they're young, ignore the people they're physically with for those who are a keystroke away, shoo their children off their laps to caress their BlackBerrys, and spend untold hours staring at pixilated porn stars when they should be working, socializing, taking care of their children or sleeping.

It begs the question: Has electronic communication officially become the most seductive mistress of all time?"

Does marriage make for happiness or does happiness make a marriage? Defenders of marriage claim the institution generates greater life satisfaction; others claim that such outcomes are due to selection factors: that people who are happy are those who are also more likely to marry. Yet a study by researchers at the University of Melbourne gives empirical evidence to the former position, finding that marriage itself is responsible for at least 61 percent of the positive effect of marriage on the subjective well-being of married men and women.

The professors analyzed data from two large representative samples: the International Social Science Surveys/Australia (IsssA), 1984-2002, and the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia panel survey, Wave 1 (2002-2003). Their first statistical model yielded what they expected: that married men and women experienced the highest level of life satisfaction (73 out of 100), relative to all other family arrangements. Divorced and separated Australians had, on average, the lowest levels of life satisfaction (64), while single or never married people experienced levels of life satisfaction in the mid-range (67). Furthermore, the differences between these three levels were each statistically significant.

These correlations remained statistically significant in regressions that controlled for independent variables such as age, sex, and family background. The family background variables included parental divorce, as the study had found that men and women, regardless of their own marital status, whose parents had divorced had significantly lower levels of life satisfaction.

To further test causality, the researchers looked at panel subsamples of the IsssA respondents in the 1990s who were single or cohabiting at the time of the first questionnaire and who subsequently married before the time of the second questionnaire. Controlling for the same factors as did the earlier regressions, they found that those who married during the interval had life-satisfaction levels about seven points higher than those who did not marry, a similar difference to that observed in the earlier regressions. Even after controlling for respondents subjective well-being at time one, the Melbourne team estimates that marriage elevates life satisfaction by about four points, a statistically significant effect.

"Our results suggest that a traditional, stable marriage is the most satisfying lifestyle, on average and other things equal." Furthermore, "divorce without remarriage, or long lasting cohabitation without formal marriage, reduces the lifetime sum of subjective well-being by 4-12% for both men and women."