If your Valentine’s Day plans include an engagement, congratulations! Besides romance, you also are more likely to experience financial joy – if your marriage works out.

Couples who get and stay married can have as much as four times the wealth of their single or divorced peers. Experts say that's not only because they can combine their salaries and share expenses once they get married.

Spouses are better off because of a combination of factors, starting with who is getting married these days.

“It’s more educated, more affluent and also more religious Americans that tend to get married in the first place,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

That gives them a starting advantage over their peers who aren’t married. 

Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or  living together romantically.

“You have further advantages,” said Pamela Smock, director of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.