Hi and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on I-Heart Radio. Back in 2019, there was a really interesting study

from the Institute for Family Studies.

You'll recall I had Brad Wilcox

from the Institute on the show a few weeks back. They do really

interesting work and they joined up with the Wheatley Institution for a study

called The Ties that Bind is Faith a Global Force for good or ill in the family and this study

found that conservative religious couples are by far the happiest and you might say say, oh, well, of course, you know, a study, an

Institute for Family Studies, they're going to support, you know, conservative

religious couples and they're going to bend the facts to say that they are the happiest, but actually the second place

happiest were secular progressive couples. I didn't find that news

particularly surprising but certain quarters like the New York Times were

pretty shocked that those terrible religious people could also have happy

marriages and I think a lot of people on the right were surprised to find that the progressives were in second place to the happy

marriage grouping. Tons of online comments allege at the time that religious women have no agency and so must have

been forced to amplify their happiness for the researchers and then other people

said oh the progressives are just lying about their happiness etc.

But taking those numbers at face value I thought it made a lot of sense.

And there was the issue of sex.

The report found that those same religious

conservatives have far higher satisfaction in their sex lives in either

secular or less religious couples. Commonly held wisdom is that the freewheeling secular people are having the best sex.

But actually, religious conservative women reported the highest level of sexual satisfaction,

...