幸福生活的七大秘诀

秘诀6：离婚让人幸福？ 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.
       研究发现，平均而言，在任何一个指定时间点，离婚人士报告的幸福感往往比已婚人士低得多。尽管这种结果可能在许多人的意料之中，但在同一时间点对两组个体进行的此类代表性抽样比较，经常会导致严重误导性的结论——就本例而言，就是离婚让人们不幸福。
 
       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，任何人都不会轻易做出离婚决定，它不太可能是出于一时冲动。人们甚至可以辩称，离婚必定让人们感到幸福，因为人们只有在离婚的益处超过成本时才会离婚。这就引出一个重要的问题：离婚前后那段时期，人们的幸福感会发生什么样的变化？
 
       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.
        根据心理学家埃德•迪耶内(Ed Diener)的说法，对男人来说，最糟糕的时期是离婚前一年；而对女人来说，最糟糕时期是离婚前两年，在离婚前一年，她们的幸福感即将反弹。这种规律可能反映出绝大多数离婚是妻子主动的事实。
 
        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.
        离婚后，男人将需要将近两年，女人需要三年时间，才能让离婚对幸福感的影响变得积极，并保持积极。也就是说，离婚夫妇往往因为分手而变得更加幸福。