According to a leading expert in happiness, unmarried women without children are the happiest sub-group of the population. Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, even goes so far as to suggest that women shouldn’t bother tying the knot or having children.

Not only are singletons without children happier, but they also live longer than their married-with-kids peers. Interestingly, Dolan says that for men, marriage is beneficial: both in terms of overall wellbeing and career prospects.

While it may be hard reading for those who hold up marriage as an indicator of personal success, the findings are not at all surprising.

I am accustomed to people telling me that my decision to remain single is folly. They say I’ve just not found the right person yet, and when I bump into my Prince Charming somewhere around Glasgow Central, I’ll soon want to be one of the ‘He Put a Ring on it!’ brigade.

Heterosexual marriage is something girls are forced to aspire to through a combination of societal dogma and nauseating Disney movies where emaciated princesses wait for the man that will generously gift them their happiness. It’s viewed as an achievement and a status symbol. Women who opt out are viewed with sympathy and suspicion.

The Spinster-Stigma is applied universally, no matter how successful or fulfilled the woman appears. We need only look at the treatment of Hollywood superstar Jennifer Aniston to see this in action. She’s worth million and lives a life of privilege and sunshine, yet her name is still met with head-tilts and murmured words of sympathy about her decade-ago divorce from Brad Pitt. That and the fact she doesn’t have children.

We don’t need this study to tell us what we already know: marriage – for women at least – is far less of a prize than it is claimed to be.

I wince when married friends with children tell me how "good2 their husbands are for doing solo childcare every now and then and emptying the dishwasher when they are reminded to.

I wonder if some husbands – those "good" men, who wear their “This is What a Feminist Looks Like’’ badges with pride – fully understand the emotional and physical labour that their wives shoulder. It’s not just housework; it’s the administration involved with child-rearing.

If I could contract out any aspect of motherhood, it would be the admin: the appointments; the fundraisers; the playdates to schedule; the vaccinations and the sheer volume of bits of paper telling you where you’re supposed to be and when.

I’m not a natural organiser, so none of this comes easily to me. My single-parent household isn’t so much a tight ship as a dinghy bobbing dangerously in the Forth and I’d expect friends with husbands to have a lighter load than I do. The reality though, is that many feel harried with assuming sole responsibility for child administration. They acquiesce to this because their husbands tell them they are just "better’’ at that sort of thing.

Of course, anecdote is not data. Fortunately though, we have plenty of this to chew on. A study of more than 23,000 women across the US showed that single mothers sleep more, have more free time and spend less time on household chores than married mothers do.

In married households, many hands ought to make light work, but the reality is that women still do most of the domestic labour – regardless of whether they also work outside of the home. MenCare, a group that promotes equal household division of labour, say that at the current rate, it will take 75 years for men to do half the unpaid work in their households.

Perhaps straight married women with children are being fulfilled in other ways? The evidence shows they are – overall – overworked and undervalued, but at least they have a romantic partner with whom to travel through life. We know how beneficial intimacy can be to mental wellbeing, and that’s surely one happiness marker that married women have over their single counterparts.

A study of more than 52,000 Americans showed that heterosexual women orgasm less frequently than any other demographic. This so-called "orgasm-gap’’ is characteristic of many marriages. When asked how often they reached climax during sex only 65 per cent of straight women ticked the box marked "usually" or "always". Few will be surprised to learn that 95% of heterosexual men did so.

Of course, this isn’t limited merely to those straight women who are married, but at least single women haven’t theoretically committed themselves to a lifetime of unsatisfying sex.

I should mention here (if only to avoid the ire of marriage evangelicals) that being married with children has many benefits. Chief among these is love, which is always something to be celebrated. It might not get the dishes done, but it does make the world go around.

And so us single women will continue to celebrate your fairytale. We will come to your weddings and coo over your beautiful newborn babies. We will mark your anniversaries (and staying power) as you enter another decade with the one you love.

While we’re doing that though, please don’t feel sorry for us. We’re quite happy living our own fairytale.