Study:
Marriage (but not remarriage) is good for your health
By Susan Perry
| Published Tue, Jul 28 2009 8:56 am
Many
studies have suggested that being in a long, stable marriage is
decidedly good for your health. Married people are apparently less
likely to develop all sorts of health problems, from the acute (the
common cold) to the chronic (heart attacks and cancer).
Married people also tend to live longer, some research has shown,
although this benefit is much greater for men than for women.
But is it getting married or staying married that offers
the health advantage?
The latter, according to a new study from University of Chicago
researchers. It found that a "marital disruption" — divorce or
widowhood — tends to damage people’s long-term health, even if
they later remarry.
In
other words, your accumulated marital history — your "marital
biography," so to speak — may (and I emphasize that word
because this research needs to be confirmed by others) have a bigger
impact than you realize on your health in middle age and beyond.
And
what if you've never married? Among the people whose health data was
analyzed for the study (8,652 white, black and Hispanic people aged
51 to 61), those who had steered clear of the marriage altar were
generally healthier than people who were currently married but who
had been divorced or experienced the death of a spouse.
According to the study, which appears in the September issue of the
Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the aspects of health
most likely to be strongly associated with past marital disruption
are those that develop slowly, such as chronic medical conditions
(diabetes, heart disease, cancer) and mobility limitations.
"We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is
extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on
health," said study co-author
Linda Waite, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago,
in a press release. "Think of health as money in the bank. Think of
a marriage as a mechanism for 'saving' or adding to health. Think of
divorce as a period of very high expenditures."
A big caveat
Waite and her co-author acknowledge that one of the study’s biggest
limitations was that it failed to consider marital quality. And,
indeed,
other research has found that unhappily married people tend to
have more risk factors for disease, such as high blood pressure (a
risk factor for heart disease), than their happily married or even
their single peers.
Defining "happy" and "unhappy" marriages is tricky, however. There
are unhappy low-conflict marriages (those with such "soft"
complaints as "We’re not communicating," "Our sexual relationship
isn’t good," "We’ve grown apart") and unhappy high-conflict ones
(those marked by chronic infidelity, addiction, abuse, and other
destructive behavior). Do both types of unhappy marriages affect
health outcomes equally?
I posed that question to
Bill Doherty, Ph.D., a professor and director of the Marriage
and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota.
"Staying in a very unhealthy marriage — a toxic, destructive
marriage — is not healthy," he said. But, he added, staying in a
low-conflict marriage — and working through the problems — appears
to benefit the long-term health of not only the husband and wife but
also their children.
Researchers didn't always believe that was true. But new, more
rigorously designed studies, ones that observe families both before
and after divorce, said Doherty, have found that divorce tends to be
detrimental to children’s health — even years later, when they’re
adults. "There’s a subset of children whose lives are better after
divorce — children who are living with parents whose high level of
conflict drags the children down," he said. "But that’s the minority
of divorces."
Health — and happiness?
So, perhaps it’s a good thing that more and more couples (according
to anecdotal
reports) are deciding to delay divorce during this Great
Recession — if they end up staying married after the economy
recovers, that is.
And here's another finding that unhappy-but-low-conflict couples who
are sticking it out may find motivational: According to
earlier research by Waite, two-thirds of unhappily married
couples who avoided divorce attorneys and stayed together reported
that their marriages were happy five years later.
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