For Valentine’s Day, The New York Times offers this essay by Andrew Yarrow, noting how marriage makes people economically better off, and how the decline of marriage among the non-college educated is creating serious economic inequalities:

Studies have shown that married women and men tend to be much better off financially than those who are unmarried, and that those who have fewer assets and more debt early on are less likely to marry or have stable marriages than those who are more financially secure.

‘There are relatively few relationships that are more fully documented than those between economic well-being and marriage,’ said Ron Haskins, who is the author of many scholarly papers on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. . . . A 2012 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the median 65-to-69-year-old married household had almost 10 times as much in savings as the typical single-person household: $111,600 compared with $12,500. ‘It’s a plain fact that people who are married have more income, wealth and savings that last into their retirement,’ Mr. Haskins said.

Maggie Gallagher is the editor of ThePulse2016.com.