A few weeks ago I posted some numbers that suggested that Latter-day Saints have significantly lower divorce rates than non-Latter-day Saints. Fair enough, but are these marriages actually happier, or is this just because the stigma against divorce in Latter-day Saint culture is keeping marriages together that would have otherwise divorced? Unlike the divorce question, I am not aware of anybody else who has tested whether Latter-day Saint marriages are happier.Thankfully, every year the General Social Survey (discussed in the last divorce post) asks married respondents about their happiness with their marriage: “Taking things all together, how would you describe your marriage? Would you say that your marriage is very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”I pooled the last 10 years in order to get enough Latter-day Saints (although the results don’t substantively change if we include the last 15 years like I did with the divorce post), and scored “very happy” as a 3, “pretty happy” as a 2, and “not too happy” as a 1.If we do this, we have 96 randomly sampled married Latter-day Saints to compare to everyone else (with 159 if we extend it back 15 years). The average non-Latter-day Saint marital happiness score is 2.59, whereas the average Latter-day Saint happiness score is 2.71. While both groups on average indicate that their happiness falls somewhere between “very happy” and “pretty happy,” Latter-day Saints are closer to “very happy.”This difference is highly statistically significant. Therefore, it does appear that, in terms of self-rated happiness with their marriage, Latter-day Saints score higher than average. As always the code is on my Github page.