幸福生活的七大秘訣

秘訣6：離婚讓人幸福？ Divorce can make you happy

       At any given point in time, those who are divorced tend to report, on average, significantly lower levels of happiness than people who are married. While this result is probably unsurprising to many people, such cross-sectional comparisons between two groups of individuals at the same point in time can often lead to severely misleading conclusions – in this case, that divorce makes people unhappy.
       研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，平均而言，在任何一個指定時間點，離婚人士報告的幸福感往往比已婚人士低得多。盡管這種結(jié)果可能在許多人的意料之中，但在同一時間點對兩組個體進行的此類代表性抽樣比較，經(jīng)常會導(dǎo)致嚴(yán)重誤導(dǎo)性的結(jié)論——就本例而言，就是離婚讓人們不幸福。
 
       For one thing, the choice to dissolve a marriage is a rare decision for any individual to take, and one that’s unlikely to have been made entirely on a whim. One could even argue that divorce must make people happy given that one would only go through with it if the benefits of doing so outweighed the costs. This leads to an important question: what happens to people’s happiness in the periods before and after divorce?
       首先，任何人都不會輕易做出離婚決定，它不太可能是出于一時沖動。人們甚至可以辯稱，離婚必定讓人們感到幸福，因為人們只有在離婚的益處超過成本時才會離婚。這就引出一個重要的問題：離婚前后那段時期，人們的幸福感會發(fā)生什么樣的變化？
 
       According to the psychologist Ed Diener, the worst moment for men is the year preceding the divorce. By contrast, the worst moment for women is two years before the divorce, with their happiness on the verge of bouncing back the year preceding the split. This pattern probably reflects the fact that the majority of divorces are initiated by the wife.
        根據(jù)心理學(xué)家埃德•迪耶內(nèi)(Ed Diener)的說法，對男人來說，最糟糕的時期是離婚前一年；而對女人來說，最糟糕時期是離婚前兩年，在離婚前一年，她們的幸福感即將反彈。這種規(guī)律可能反映出絕大多數(shù)離婚是妻子主動的事實。
 
        After a divorce, it then takes approximately two years for men and three years for women for the effect of the break-up on happiness to become positive and stay positive. In other words, it seems that divorcing couples often become significantly happier with their lives by breaking up.
        離婚后，男人將需要將近兩年，女人需要三年時間，才能讓離婚對幸福感的影響變得積極，并保持積極。也就是說，離婚夫婦往往因為分手而變得更加幸福。