Philadelphia ? When it comes to your long-term happiness, it’s worse to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, at least according to a review article by Michigan State University psychologist Richard Lucas.

Lucas set out to investigate a commonly held view in his field – that people are born to be happy or sad, with the slings and arrows of fortune altering that “set point” only temporarily.

But nobody had specifically looked at the impact of big life changes, such as marriage, divorce or unemployment, he said. He found that marriage buoyed the spirits for only about two years, after which the spouses were no happier than they had been as singles.

But divorce, he found, could plunge you permanently into the emotional dumps. So could losing your job.

His findings, based on several different studies, were published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

On the plus side, he said, divorced people could climb back to the relative happiness they enjoyed as singles by getting remarried. But for those who had been fired, even finding a new job didn’t completely repair the damage.

He said his study backs up our intuitive sense about the hazards of heartbreak. Still, he was surprised to find divorce had a more permanent effect than the loss of a spouse to death, from which the average person recovers in seven years.

His results would seem to contradict previous surveys showing married people were happier than singles – whether two years or two decades into marriage. But a closer look showed they were happier five years before taking their vows. So it’s not so much that marriage makes you happy, he said, “but that happy people are more likely to get married.”