Marriage

Marriage makes you healthy

From as far back as the 1850s, studies of married people versus single people seem to show that you are much better off if you are married. In study after study, married people have been found to be healthier. They seem to live longer, to be less likely to get cancer or to have a heart attack, to get sick less often, and to heal faster than single people. In a meta-analysis that combined the results of marriage studies for more than 250,000 elderly people, those who were widowed, divorced, or single were all at a higher risk of death than those who were married. Changes in marital status, such as becoming widowed or getting a divorce, have been associated with having more health problems in many studies. Marriage seems like a key to good health. In fact, the U.S. government’s Healthy Marriage Initiative cites a huge number of benefits from healthy marriages—everything from being physically and emotionally healthier, to having more stable employment and higher wages.

Before you race out to get married or decide that you need to stay married no matter what, you need to understand an important principle behind all of these studies—it matters a great deal whether the marriage is a healthy one or not. A New York Times columnist (and one of our favorite health journalists), Tara Parker-Pope, has catalogued the many studies of marriage and health in her book For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. As she summarizes from the many studies, being married alone is not enough to make you healthy. It matters very much whether your marriage is a healthy and happy one. If a person is in a troubled or stressful marriage, he or she is actually less likely to be healthy than a person who was never married at all. A change in your marital status can also lead to more significant health problems; in a study following close to 9,000 men and women, people who became divorced or had a spouse die were more likely to have health problems than people who had never been married.

The quality of the marital relationship matters more than whether you are married. Not only are people in troubled marriages in poorer health than people in strong marriages, but individuals in a troubled marriage have greater health risks than those who are divorced. For example, studies of marital stress and health have found that the immune systems of women in unhappy relationships do not respond as well as the immune systems of women in happy relationships or women who have happily left a relationship. Another study shows that married couples who argue with each other were connected with slower healing of physical wounds on their skin, with the slowest healing for couples who argued with the most hostility. Being in a bad marriage can physically hurt your heart; women with more marital stress are at higher risk of having heart attacks, and married men who have high-conflict fights with their spouses have worse scores on certain heart health ratings. The effects of marital strain also appear to affect a person’s health more as people are older. In other words, being in a stressful marriage is more likely to have an even worse effect on your health as you get older. This is another argument against sticking it out in a troubled marriage for any supposed health benefits.

The summary of the current studies of marriage is that marriage can be a great thing for your health—if the marriage is a healthy one! Any unhappy marriage can actually make your health worse, and you should not try to stick it out in a problematic relationship just because you think it will be good for your health. Sadly, the very opposite may be true.