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In the year 2000, having narrowly escaped the Y2K computer glitch, Americans should have been poised to party. The bendy riff of the Santana–Rob Thomas joint “Smooth” wailed from Top 40 stations everywhere. Survivor beckoned us to watch people eat grubs for a chance at $1 million. Brad and Jen got married, and the gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius asked acerbically, “Are you not entertained?”

But we weren’t. In fact, after chugging along steadily for decades, American happiness began to decline that year, modestly but definitively. A chart of American happiness ratings looks like this: a flat, basically happy line that starts in the 1970s, followed by a plunge into meh right around the new millennium.

The chart comes from a recent paper by Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago. For the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Peltzman looked at the General Social Survey, which since 1972 has asked thousands of Americans, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” If you imagine this large sample as 100 people, historically about 50 of those people say they’re “pretty happy,” and that’s still true. But in the 1970s, about 35 people would say they’re “very happy,” and 15 would say “not too happy.” That began to shift around 2000, and now about 32 people say they’re “very happy” and 18 say they’re “not too happy.”

To quote a Destiny’s Child song of that vintage, why the sudden change?

After slicing the demographic data every which way—income, education level, race, location, age, and gender—Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing: Married people are happier, and Americans aren’t getting married as much. In 1980, 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, but today, it’s 25 percent. “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness,” he writes.

[Read: A happiness columnist’s three biggest happiness rules]

Married people are much happier than the unmarried, according to these data. Looking at those same 100 people, 40 married people will say they’re happy, and 10 will say they’re not happy. But single people are about evenly split between happy and not happy. It doesn’t really matter if you are divorced, are widowed, or have never married: If you’re not married, you’re less likely to be happy. “The only happy people for 50 years have been married people,” Peltzman told me.

One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

To be honest, this puzzles me, because after 13 years of cohabitation, I’m currently trying to get married, and it’s not making me very happy at all. I say “trying” because this event, which should be entirely within my partner’s and my control, instead relies on a sprawling, expensive bureaucracy that doesn’t always reply to my emails.

Marriage, in theory, doesn’t have to cost much; a license usually runs less than $100. In practice, though, the costs can be considerable. The average wedding now costs $30,000, according to a survey from The Knot. Prenups are becoming more popular; a Harris poll recently reported that 15 percent of Americans have signed one. And that leaves aside the psychic toll of checking in with, following up on, and coordinating all the marriage-adjacent entities that inevitably get sucked into the process.

Getting married, especially at an advanced age, is difficult and expensive even if, like my boyfriend and me, you’re not planning an actual wedding. As of this writing, we’re waiting on my prenup lawyer to get back to me, so that I can wade through a bunch of paragraphs that start with “Notwithstanding the forgoing” and identify any changes I’d like to make, so that my boyfriend’s prenup lawyer can then reconcile those changes and we can get the thing notarized. This will cost us at least $1,200 each, on top of the $600 we already spent drafting the prenup. (I didn’t think I needed a prenup, either, until I had a physical therapist who alternately kneaded my spine and regaled me with the story of her traumatic divorce that almost bankrupted her.) I’m not sure which is more magical: this, or picking out a health-insurance plan.

Even beyond the preparation stages, marriage has a reputation for sapping joy and freedom. Bachelorette parties are proclaimed to be the “last fling before the ring,” as though in matrimony you won’t be flinging much but emergency paper towels across the kitchen. The single life is freewheeling, fun, and fabulous; marriage is “settling down”—down to earth, to baseline, to not-too-happiness. How could something so boring and restrictive make people so happy?

[Read: Fewer sex partners means a happier marriage]

Peltzman didn’t explore why married people are happier, but other researchers have, and they fall into two competing camps. Camp No. 1, that of cynical libertines like me, believes that marriage doesn’t make you happy; rather, happy people get married. One 15-year study of more than 24,000 Germans, for instance, found that those who got married and stayed married were happier than the unmarried ones to begin with, and any happiness boost they got from the marriage was short-lived. “Most of the research indicates that the happiest couples marry, not that marriage causes happiness,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a demography professor at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, told me over email. According to this theory, Americans stopped being as happy, and they stopped getting married, and either the two trends don’t have much to do with each other, or glum people aren’t in the mood for wedding planning.

The first camp’s argument makes sense if you think about the kind of person who gets married: This person has a sufficiently winning personality to run the gantlet of online dating. They are desirable enough to get their Hinge match to propose to them. They are optimistic enough to promise to love their Hinge match forever, forsaking all other Hinge matches. This person is, in other words, already pretty happy.

When people aren’t happy in marriage, they tend to divorce, which plunks them into the unhappy single pool and makes the married pool look happier by comparison. “We have very high expectations of marriage. So that tends to mean that people don’t get married unless they have a strong, close, and supportive relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “You’re not going to get married and then find that you are much more happy.” As the classic Adam Sandler sketch goes, you’re still going to be you on vacation. You’re still going to be you when you’re married. If you’re sad now, marriage probably won’t change that.

In Camp No. 2 are the romantics, who believe that getting married makes you happy, because there’s something special about marriage. In a research brief for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, the research fellow Lyman Stone crunched the GSS data again and found that getting married does boost happiness, for at least two years after the wedding, and it does so even when you control for the person’s previous level of happiness.

The logic of this camp goes as follows: Close, supportive, long-term relationships make you happy. Finding those types of relationships through friendships is possible, but it’s hard. People move away; they get busy. Most friends don’t buy houses or raise children jointly—the kinds of activities that glue people together and force them to cooperate. Marriage, says Andrew Cherlin, an emeritus sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, is “the usual way to find a durable, caring relationship that undoubtedly makes you happier than you would be if you didn’t have it.”

Perhaps the strongest evidence for this camp’s thinking comes from a 2017 study of thousands of British people that found that those who got married were more satisfied with their life than those who didn’t, even when you control for how satisfied they were before they got married. It also found that the married Brits were more satisfied years later (meaning the happiness boost wasn’t fleeting), and that marriage inoculated the couples somewhat from the midlife dip in happiness that most people experience. The people who felt the biggest happiness boost from marriage, that study found, were those who said their spouse was their “best friend.” Those people got almost twice as much satisfaction from marriage as other people did.

[From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis]

A spouse, then, is like a super-friend. Ideally, they’re “committed to spend their entire life helping you in everything that matters to you,” Stone says. A good spouse will buffer you from the stress of your job, your kids, your family of origin. They’ll give you emotional, and sometimes financial, support, allowing you to “feel and think with double strength,” as George Eliot put it. Because you live in the same house, your spouse is always there. (Boy, are they always there!) It can be exasperating—until the day comes when you really need a friend.

The question remains, though: Why get married? As a cohabitant, I feel I reap all the benefits of marriage without spending even a minute crying over caterers. In countries where unmarried cohabitation is widespread, relatively accepted, and stable, the arrangement can have similar benefits as marriage. One study of Germans, for instance, found that cohabitation leads to a happiness boost about two-thirds as big as that of marriage. (The study doesn’t explain the slight gap between married people and cohabitants, but it could be that some cohabitants aren’t quite happy enough with their partner to pull the trigger on marriage.) In these cultures, cohabiting partners act like pseudo-spouses, and they support each other in much the same way. “It’s the sharing of the stuff,” says John Helliwell, an emeritus economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the 2017 British study. “And the legal thing is probably the least important part of it.”

But in the United States, people don’t tend to cohabit for years and years (present company excluded). They just get married. “I’ve been waiting for Americans to have long-term cohabiting relationships like the Europeans do for decades now, and it hasn’t happened yet,” Cherlin says. Happy cohabiting couples don’t show up in the data because there just aren’t that many of us.

For me, getting married is more optical than emotional. I’m tired of being a woman pushing 40 who has a “boyfriend.” People keep asking me if I’m against marriage, and I have to sheepishly reply that it’s more that I’m against spending thousands of dollars on a piece of paper. But my partner has been by my side for 13 years. He’s the first person I call with good or bad news. He doesn’t like to be mean, but he will hate on my enemies with me when he can tell that I really want him to. I have a lot going on in life, and I want to plant a firm stake in shifting soil. He’s already my super-friend; now I just want to make it official.

Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protestors, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.

Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.

Though written from different angles—Illouz is a prominent sociologist, and Penslar is a distinguished historian—both echo the brilliant Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Historians have always acknowledged the impact of emotions on the body politic. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides emphasized how fear led the Spartans to declare war on Athens, how fear deafened Athenians to the reason of Pericles, and how fear made them vulnerable to the demagoguery of Cleon. But Thucydides also emphasized the role of love, noting that Pericles failed to persuade his fellow citizens to love Athens and lamenting that Alcibiades, Pericles’s unworthy successor, seduced the Athenians with his proposal to invade Sicily—generating a bolt of eros that, after galvanizing the city, led to its eventual downfall.

More than two millennia later, fear and love are still tearing us apart and bringing us together. Both Illouz and Penslar consider these and other emotions. On the dark side, there are the usual suspects: resentment, disgust, and (in Penslar’s case) hatred; on the light side, Illouz focuses on pride as well as love, while Penslar takes up gratitude.

Consider fear. Illouz paraphrases a famous remark by Thomas Hobbes in writing that when Israel was born, fear was born as its twin. She neglects to add that Hobbes insisted that the news of the Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 caused his mother to give premature birth to him. As for Israel, the fear that accompanied the country's founding stemmed not just from the news that the Arab armies were invading in response to its announcement of independence but also from the “quasi-metaphysical belief,” as Illouz puts it—stoked by centuries of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic experiences that climaxed in the Holocaust—that the world, quite simply, demanded the annihilation of the Jews.

This sense of constant threat is an active force in the country, where fear is permanently installed over the political landscape, giving rise to what Illouz calls a “securitist democracy” whose politics are shaped by existential imperatives. Of course, she does not dismiss the serious and several threats that confront Israel. (Among the people she interviewed were three women who belong to a kibbutz in the northwestern Negev, where “constant fear” dictates their daily schedules and sentiments.) But Illouz also emphasizes the crippling fears that inform the lives of Arabs living in Israel. As a lawyer in East Jerusalem observes, one “lives with the constant threat of incarceration, of stop and frisk … You are in constant fear of being in the wrong place.”

[Read: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

In the realm of fear, the demagogue is king. The fear spurred by a clear and present danger can have a positive consequence, forging a sense of unity and community where none had before existed. Much more often, however, fear is exploited by political leaders for partisan goals inimical to the nation’s well-being. Illouz describes the dependence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career—he has served as Israel’s prime minister longer than Franklin Roosevelt did as America’s president—on his relentless and skillful manipulation of fear. Illouz even goes so far as to say that Netanyahu wrote the playbook to which Donald Trump’s political career is an appendix. Netanyahu’s rhetoric, she concludes, portrays a state of Israel divided between two camps: “one that would defend the survival of the state, another that would threaten it.”

Similarly, Penslar associates Netanyahu with what the author calls “Catastrophic Zionism,” which combines and capitalizes on the “fear for the survival of Jews outside Israel and those in the state of Israel itself.” Like Illouz, Penslar emphasizes that Netanyahu fueled this fear on the eve of the 2015 elections, when his campaign deliberately blurred the line between Palestinians living in the occupied territories and those who were Israeli citizens, sending a text message warning supporters that “Arab voters [are] moving in droves to the polling stations.” It was a winning strategy for Netanyahu, as it was for other populists one year later. In 2016, as British voters prepared to vote on the Brexit referendum, posters appeared picturing droves of nonwhite migrants under the bold red warning Breaking Point, while American voters, poised to vote in the 2016 presidential election, listened to the Republican candidate Donald Trump warning against droves of drug dealers and rapists massing at the southern border.

We tend to hate the things we fear. With great care and clarity, Penslar traces not just the long  history of hatred aimed at Jews by anti-Semites and many anti-Zionists. He also tracks the hatred that most Zionists directed at the British during the mandate governing Palestine from 1918 to 1948—a hatred that shifted to Palestinians after independence. His summary of Israel’s denial of its citizens’ own anti-Palestinian hatred and its baleful consequences is especially powerful. Though many Israelis, Penslar writes, “bore the knowledge of what they had done during the 1948 war, the instruments of official memory … presented a sanitized version, denying not only the violence wrought by Jews against Palestinians but also the presence of hatred and rage behind it.”

We also hate those things which disgust us. In another of her books, From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum measures this emotion’s noxious effects on societies. Whereas anger, which can lead to urgent political or social reforms, has its uses, disgust is worse than useless. As Nussbaum argues, it leads at best to “escape and disengagement” and at worst to racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Illouz, who cites this book of Nussbaum’s, argues that disgust also fuels anti-Arab sentiment in Israel, a trend boosted by what she calls “disgust entrepreneurs” whose task is “to create, engineer, and reinforce disgust from some groups to others.”

One trailblazing entrepreneur was among America’s most toxic exports: Meir Kahane, the founder of Israel’s ultranationalist and racist Kach Party. His extremist views on citizenship, marriage, and education—all of which align with a politics of purity driven by fear of contamination—set the standard for admirers who now have prominent roles in Netnayahu’s government, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national-security minister, who belonged to Kach’s youth movement, and Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister, who called for “wiping out” a West Bank town that was recently at the center of violent actions against settlers.

Ben-Gvir spoke at a commemoration for Kahane last year and reminded his audience, “Ultimately, Rabbi Kahane was about love.” That love can be as problematic as it is powerful was underscored by Ben-Gvir’s proviso that Kahane loved Israel “without compromise, without any other consideration.” In a superb account of the ties that bind Eros and Eretz Israel, Penslar reveals the pivotal role played by historians and novelists—not just Jewish writers such as Heinrich Graetz, whose sentimental historical narratives about Jews over the centuries won a wide following in Europe in the 19th century, but also Gentile writers such as George Eliot. The eponymous hero of the latter’s novel Daniel Deronda, a noble and sensitive youth who discovers his Jewish roots, in effect became Victorian England’s rejoinder to the self-interested, unscrupulous character of Fagan from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist— Deronda was someone with whom Jewish and Gentile readers could fall in love.

Penslar pursues the impact of literary works on the evolution of American Jewry’s emotional ties to Israel well into the 20th century, including a long glance at Leon Uris’s Exodus. Published in 1958, the novel sold more than 20 million copies and galvanized American Jewish readers. As they became enamored with the characters Ari Ben Canaan and Kitty Fremont, they fell even more deeply in love with the idea of Israel—albeit an Israel where all Israelis were portrayed as brave and brilliant and all Arabs as untrustworthy and unworthy. (Penslar gives short shrift, though, to the film version. Was I the only American teenager who, when he left to work as a kibbutz volunteer, was humming Ernest Gold’s theme song?)

[Read: Israel has already lost]

Just as love can unite a people, a love that is built on excluding others can also divide. Illouz offers a sobering account not only of the deepening animosity between Israelis and Palestinians, but also of the persistent acrimony between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities. It is no secret that Netanyahu’s Likud party has won the support of Sephardic voters by exploiting their resentment over the discrimination they have experienced. As Illouz argues, Likud’s populist and nationalist rhetoric has seduced the Mizrahim—Jews of Afro-Asian descent—despite the fact that the leadership is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and their neoliberal policies penalize the very people who support them. As a result, she concludes, “nationalism has come to be a class marker, as it has become the identity of those who stand diametrically opposed to … the ‘cosmopolitan class.’”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Illouz and Penslar both conclude their books by investigating hopefulness as an emotion. Israel, after all, originated as a great vessel of hope for people across the world—nationalism as a kind of redemption for a long-suffering people. Illouz suggests that hope, in principle, can strengthen the bonds of fraternity not just among the nation's own members but with other countries as well, opening the way to dialogue, tolerance, and justice. Perhaps, but there is something forlorn in hoping that hope will carry the day. Given recent events in Israel (and the United States),  Penslar’s conclusion, tragically, carries greater weight. He reminds us that the Hebrew word for hope is tikvah, whose literal biblical meaning is “cord” or “rope”—“something to hold onto.” Many of us now find ourselves grasping this cord more tightly than ever before.

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