Writing about sexual inequality among males got me wondering about the bottom line: Are men who have no partners unhappy?
As we discussed before, the General Social Survey asked people how many sexual partners they had in the past year. They also asked if the person was generally very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days.
The graph shows that men with at least one partner tend to be happier. Specifically, 32% with at least one partner is very happy, compared to only 23% of those with no one.
On the other extreme, 19% of the celibate guys were not too happy, while the number for the other group was only 11%.
So having a sex partner is associated with happiness. We just don't know what's causing what. I like to think that sex is not as important as elite culture assures us it is, but it could be the driving force here.
On the other hand, unhappy people might have less luck finding and holding on to partners. I suspect more and more that personality traits, which are grounded in brain wiring and are due to a large extent to genes, explain a lot. It might be, for example, that people who score high on negative emotionality are more likely to find themselves alone.
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