Wedding bells provide only around £9,000 worth of joy to women, a new study suggests.
The differences between the sexes continue even when it comes to divorce.
Men are so devastated by the break up of a marriage that it feels as though they have lost £61,500.
For women, however, the pain is less traumatic – and leaves them feeling as if they had lost only a measly £5,000.
The sums are estimates of the value in cash terms of the happiness that a marriage brings.
They have been calculated by estimating how much money a person would have to receive in a lump sum to bring the same amount of joy.
Paul Frijters, an Australian university professor, has spent the last eight years following the effect of major life events on 10,000 people.
He said: "These are real people to whom unexpected things happen.
"They were not selected because these things would happen and, because of that, we can accurately compare their happiness before and after."
The volunteers were asked to rate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of 0 to 10.
The most common number given was eight.
However, the ratings changed after, and sometimes in anticipation of, life-altering events, including sudden changes in income.
These changes allowed Prof Frijters, from the Queensland University of Technology, to assign cash values to the happiness created by events such as marriage, divorce and illness.
He found that expectant parents were happier in the build up to their child’s birth.
However, within months they were slightly less happy than they would have been if they had not had children.
Correspondingly, the birth of a child scores a low cash sum, more than £18,000 for a man and just under £5,000 for a woman.
The findings also show that we feel the loss of a loved one more keenly than finding new love.
Paul Frijters said: "Losing a loved one has a much bigger effect than gaining a loved one.
“There's a real asymmetry between life and death.
"This shouldn't surprise us.
“Human beings seem primed to notice losses more than gains."
The death of a partner or a child creates the feeling of a loss of £73,000 to a woman and more than £350,000 to a man, according to the findings.
Prof Frijters cautioned: "This isn't the value of the life that's lost, that would be much higher, of course.
"This is just the effect on the happiness of one person flowing from a death."
He said he did not know why major life events appeared to have different effects on men than women.
"But it does tend to give me confidence in the calculations,” he said.
"We know for instance that marriage improves the lives of men much more than women."
Some of the other findings appear to fit with stereotypes of the different sexes.
For example, women feel a boost of around £1,500 when they move house, while men feel a loss of around £9,000 during the same move.
Prof Frijters said that his calculations suggest that money has a greater effect on happiness than has previously been thought.
The worth of major life events
Marriage
Man – £17,675.68
Woman – £8,726.25
Birth of child
Man – £18,236.39
Woman – £4,866.77
Divorce
Man – loss of £61,116.46
Woman – loss of £4,977.08
Death of a loved one
Man – loss of £350,830.36
Woman – loss of £73,204.86
Illness
Man – loss of £201,264.68
Woman – loss of £28,124.61
Moving home
Man – loss of 8,947.11
Woman – £1,453.80
