Good morning.
I
guess it's commonly known among people who study such things, but I wasn't
aware that "married people tend to be healthier than both the previously
(bereaved, divorced, and separated) and never married." Why this is so has been unclear, so "research
has increasingly focused on how psychological stress experienced by unmarried
versus married individuals may differentially impact physiological systems
related to health." The study
appeared in a journal article in
Psychoneuroendocrinology, The Official Journal of the International Society
of Psychoneuroendocrinology, with a charming title that makes sense but sure
wouldn't attract a lot of non-science readers:
"Marital status as a predictor of diurnal salivary cortisol levels
and slopes in a community sample of healthy adults." The background:
Compared
to those who are married, numerous studies document higher rates of morbidity
and mortality among previously and never married individuals. Previously married individuals experience
increased social isolation, a loss of social support, and stigma related to
their separation. Individuals who are
never married also experience stigma and discrimination based on their
non-normative marital status. Recent
interpretations of this literature suggest that the health benefits of marriage
are partly or wholly attributable to better health in the happily married. However, there are reasons that married
people might be healthier irrespective of the quality of their relationships
such as their access to health insurance, contact with a broader social
network, and more regular routines.
Either way, this literature suggests that unmarried individuals are
subject to experiencing multiple sources of stress that might put them at risk
for disease and death. [Citations
omitted.]
A
study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of
Pittsburgh found that stress may indeed be one reason why there is a difference. What they learned, in a pretty decent study
(methodologically speaking), was that married individuals have lower levels of
cortisol than do the never-married or previously-married (divorced, separated,
widowed) and that the rhythms of cortisol in the body vary by marital status
(it drops off more rapidly during the day for married folks). ("Married" includes couples living
together in a marital-like relationship.)
Cortisol is a hormone produced by the body that is central to modulating
stress. "Increased cortisol
production and disruption of cortisol's daily rhythm have been linked to poorer
health outcomes." (The quality of
the marriage seems not to matter.)
The
researchers note the limitations of their study. It's observational (using saliva analyses),
so they can't draw an inference about the causal direction (does marriage
reduce cortisol levels or do people with lower cortisol levels marry at a
higher rate?), although the proposition that cortisol levels affect who gets
married seems implausible. There's no
evidence that there are behavioral effects from varying levels of
cortisol. They also used a relatively
young sample (ages 21-55) and selected for good health, so "the current
results may not be generalizable to older or less healthy populations." It may also be that it's more socially
acceptable to be unmarried at age 60 than at age 30. Finally, they assume that "cortisol may
be an important mediator of the association between marital status and health
outcomes." They do note, however,
that "there is increasing evidence that elevated levels of cortisol and
flatter cortisol rhythms may play a role in other important health outcomes
including cardiovascular risk."
Interestingly,
there was no difference in perceived
stress between the married and the never married (but there was elevated
perception of stress among the previously married). The authors didn't expect that result; they
observe that it may have been a function of the instrument they used to measure
stress. Seems to me it's also possible
that the never married weren't as bothered—not missing something they didn't
have and perhaps didn't want—while the previously married were, knowing what
they missed and how they fare socially in comparison to when they were part of
a couple. Being a "one" in a
world of "twos" is not always fun, especially if your social world is
comprised primarily of "twos.".
They
did not report results by sex. I think
that's unfortunate. Given what seems to
be the case for friendships, and that single women do better than single men at
least psychologically and on tables of morbidity and mortality, it seems to me
likely that women would have fewer stressors (and lower levels of cortisol)
than men. The lack of difference in
perceived stress might also be accounted for by single women who aren't
especially stressed by their status. I
wrote to one of the authors of the study, asking why they didn't control for
sex. He wrote back and said they did—and
found no difference.
This
research is hardly a brief for getting married if one is not otherwise inclined
to do so. The research also doesn't
speak to those who are over 55 (as the authors explicitly point out). One can imagine that the period when you're
between 21 and 55 is the time you're most likely to be concerned about social
and relationships status. Are people of
my vintage, over 60, less worried about such things? Because in many cases they are largely
settled? (In my case, I was extremely
alarmed at my status after the divorce, at age 55, but that was because I
wanted to be married and liked being married, not a question of social
stressors per se.)
I had to go look for myself and
found that whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on "Marriage and Health"
did a good job of reviewing the literature.
The summary statements (citations omitted) are clear:
Marriage
and health are closely related. Married
people experience lower morbidity and mortality across such diverse health
threats as cancer, heart attacks, and surgery. . . . The health-protective effect of marriage is
stronger for men than women. Marital
status — the simple fact of being married — confers more health benefits to men
than women. Women's health is more
strongly impacted than men's by marital conflict or satisfaction, such that
unhappily married women do not enjoy better health relative to their single
counterparts. Laboratory studies
indicate that women have stronger physiological reactions than men in response
to marital conflict.
So
looking at the research population by sex would have been enlightening. I can only reconcile their findings of no
difference by sex with other social science research about how single women
fare better than single men by concluding it's the age limit in their
study.
The findings on marriage and health
are, incidentally, a subset of the general finding that "social
relationships more broadly have a powerful impact on health. . . . Those with stronger social relationships had
a 50% lower risk of all-cause mortality.
Conversely, loneliness is associated with increased risk for
cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality." There hasn't been much research on health
benefits of marriage vis-Ã -vis friendships or vis-Ã -vis cohabiting couples (or
on same-sex marriages).
However,
there are several reasons why marriage may exert a greater health impact than
other relationships, even other cohabiting relationships: married couples spend time together during a
wide variety of activities, such as eating, leisure, housekeeping, child-care
and sleep. Spouses also share resources
and investments such as joint finances or home-ownership. Relative to other
relationships, the increased interdependence of marriage serves as a source for
more intense support. Romantic couples
who live together, but are unmarried, may represent a middle ground in health
benefits between those who are married, and those who self-identify as single.
One cannot conclude, however, that
the health risks for single older (than 55, say) women are greater than those
of their married counterparts.
* * *
Now comes other research on marriage
with conclusions that run in the opposite direction! A professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State
medical school published research this year suggesting that the health benefits
of marriage have declined in recent decades to the point where it may not even
exist. Even though past research
demonstrates that married people, on average, are healthier, and for a
multitude of reasons, Dmitry Tumin reports that studies of the effects of
marriage on health in the last decade or so have led to increased doubt about
the existence of the effect. (Even the
research suggesting a health benefit finds that marriage brevity, and divorce,
moderate it. The research has also had
to tease out the possibility that it is healthier people who tend to get
married, so a marriage effect would be a spurious statistical relationship; it
seems that isn't the case.) One finding
has remained reasonably robust:
long-term—but only long-term—marriages do provide a measurable health
benefit for women.
Assuming the decline exists, Dr.
Tumin speculates on causes. It may be
that the role of marriage in society has changed; people in cohorts following
the Baby Boomers are marrying at lower rates (especially people in lower
socio-economic circumstances). Maybe it's
because getting married is simply a continuation of previous cohabitation
(rather than a change from being single to being married), so there wouldn't be
any marked change in health benefit.
There's also the possibility that causes of the marriage effect are
being undermined by other social changes:
with the delayed marriage age, the social benefits of marriage (which
affect health) are being derived in other ways, through family, friends, and
unrelated roommates; younger people are also relying more on parental financial
support (and reasonable financial security also contributes to better health).
Other reasons, which seem to me
plausible, is that being single (i.e., a "bachelor" or a "spinster")
no longer carries the stigma that it may have in earlier decades, and that jobs
can be had that provide a sufficient income for a single person to be
financially secure. (That one, however,
may be true for those with jobs with salaries that are well above the minimum
wage but not for those who are working for $7-8-9 per hour. Elliott's an example; his job at the
University immediately put him well ahead of a number of his friends/classmates
when one takes into account both salary and fringe benefits.)
Other
potential reasons for the decline in the health benefit is that there may be a
decline in the quality of marriages because of the strain of expecting to have
two incomes and the concomitant loss of time spent together; "against a
backdrop of greater demands at home and at work, and less time spent together,
today's married couples may indeed experience marriage more as a source of
conflict and stress than as a resource that safeguards their health." (I'm not so sure about this one; I know
perfectly well that "for example" is no proof, but I know a large
number of long-married couples where both worked and there were children
involved.)
Dr.
Tumin concludes:
Among
cohorts marrying between the 1980s and the 2000s, differences in general health
between married and never-married adults were shown to decline, even before
accounting for selection. The marriage
effect on within-person change in general health . . . also declined across
successive cohorts of women, and was absent in all cohorts of men. While these findings give further reason for
skepticism about the capacity of marriage to enhance the public health, the
rapid transformation of American marriage—including recent national
legalization of same-sex marriage and increasing divergence in the likelihood
of marriage between the socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged—requires
ongoing monitoring of further changes in marital effects on health.
So here are two studies that reach
the opposite conclusions. One of them is
biological (measuring cortisol), the other is based on survey research. Survey responses can be tricky to use and
from which to obtain valid results; Dr. Tumin used the "Panel Study of
Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal survey of households. . . . The main dependent variable is respondents'
general health measured on a five-point scale (1 = excellent, 2 = very good, 3
= good, 4 = fair, and 5 = poor), and treated as a continuous variable in
regression analyses. This scale is
widely used as a measure of general health that is highly predictive of later
morbidity and mortality. . . . The PSID
asked heads of households to rate both their own and their spouse's health. Spouse-rated health has been shown to predict
mortality as well as self-rated health."
My bet is that there's still a
health benefit to marriage, one that's moderated in all sorts of ways,
depending on the circumstances. It's
surprising to me that the second study reported finding no benefit at all for
men (and citing other studies that reach the same conclusion), a finding that
runs contrary to years of research. I am
highly skeptical. I also like biology
rather than surveys.
* * *
I
didn't intend to dwell this much on marriage, but I was intrigued by an article
in Social Psychology Quarterly titled
"Do "His" and "Her" Marriages Influence One Another? Contagion in Personal Assessments of Marital
Quality among Older Spouses over a Four-Year Span" (as reported by
Bloomberg). Jeffrey Stokes, a
sociologist at Illinois State University, looked at how the attitude of one
spouse toward a marriage affects the attitude of the other. Part of this is "well, duh"
research (if I am positive about my marriage, and treat my wife with courtesy
and affection/love and kindness, she's likely to reciprocate both in attitude
and action). But nobody had actually
looked at the data.
What
I found interesting—what I didn't know before—is that there has been research
consistently showing that older men (that is, over 50) rate their marriages
more highly than do their wives. Stokes
looked at survey responses on marriage quality from about 200 couples over age
50 (and the average length of marriage was 35 years, so clearly many of these
couples were north of 50); on a 4-point scale, men scored their marriage 3.2
while women scored them 2.99.
Probably
not surprisingly, the difference is less among young (hetero) couples (the data
were gathered before same-sex marriage was legalized). Of course, the gap could also widen as the
couples get older. What's also happened,
perhaps reflective of these results, is that "about two-thirds of divorces
are initiated by women, and the divorce rate for Americans over 50 has doubled
in the past three decades. One in four
divorces now involve people older than 50." Which, of course, can really screw up
retirement plans for both of them.
The
gist is that if you don't like your marriage, your view is going to affect your
spouse's view. If you like it, show it,
and your spouse will likely come to like it, too (or, one hopes, grow more
positive about it).
* * *
Since I'm stuck on marriage for the
moment, I can report (from Quartz)
that there have been troubling data accumulating. Two economists, Francine Blau and Anne
Winkler, find that marriage is increasingly becoming a phenomenon of the upper
and middle socio-economic-educational classes, not the lower ones, and
particularly of college-educated women.
1960: 87% of 30- to 50-year-olds (men and women)
were married
2015: 60% " " " were married
The
changes have not occurred evenly across groups.
One marked change: it used to be
that college-educated women were less likely
to be married than women with less of an education. Now college-educated women are more likely to be married than women
with less education. It isn't that the
marriage rate for college-educated women increased (it declined from about 80%
to 70%); what happened is that the marriage rate among less educated women
plummeted (from about 87-88% to about 57/58%).
Similar changes occurred with men, but not to the same degree.
Other
researchers, at the Brookings Institution, speculate that one reason for the
change is that educated women have reframed marriage to be a more equitable and
attractive bond. Earlier, they could
take a male-dominated relationship or have their independence—but not
both. Now they can have both, a stable
marriage, raising children where they have them, and still have their
independence.
A parallel report, covered on the
website MEL (which "covers sex, relationships, health, money
and culture from a male point of view — even though we're not all male"), looked at
marriage rates from the standpoint of income.
"While marriage rates
are down across the board, the marriage rate for relatively poor,
non-college-educated Americans has fallen more precipitously, meaning marriage
is increasingly the province of the middle and upper classes."
One would think marriage would be
even more attractive to those with less money because of the advantages it
provides (e.g., combining households, tax advantages). But nope, it's the opposite. During and after the most recent recession, in
particular, there were a lot of "pissed-off" blue-collar workers,
especially men.
So these MEL authors spent time
talking with a University of Minnesota law professor, June Carbone, who's
written a book on families. She
maintains that divorce rates increased in the 1970s, as divorce laws became
more liberal, but the divorce rate for college grads after 2000 returns to
about what it was in the 1960s. On the
other hand, the rate increased for non-college-educated couples beginning in
1990. Professor Carbone concludes that "lower-class
relationships were becoming less stable."
She posits two kinds of stable marriages, as did the Brookings
researchers: patriarchal and
egalitarian.
Patriarchal: The husband earns more, and he trades his
income for custody rights to the children.
He's the head of the family; she takes care of the household. If they divorce, she gets a share of his
savings, while he gets custody. They
both see it as a good deal.
Egalitarian: The second model is both spouses are in the
workforce and both have a good income.
And both help out with the kids, taking them to doctor's appointments
and dropping them off at soccer practice.
What has happened is that the second
model requires trust and stability—and many men in the lower
economic-educational classes have neither:
they can't stay employed, so they're harder to trust because their
economic status is so uncertain.
Another difference is the
circumstances of pregnancy. Before the
advent of widely-available birth control, many marriages were born of
pregnancy. Once it became available, the
age of marriage increased. Conversely,
the rate of pregnancy among college-educated women declined—but the average age
of pregnancy for women who did not go to college stayed the same. At the same time, those women became less
likely to marry the father. Why? Because there was no financial incentive to
do so (in terms of the father having a job).
The blue-collar guys are less likely to be employed and their incomes
declined—so the possibility of a stable relationship declined as well. Women now rely more on themselves; for one
thing, they can more easily earn an income, unlike in the past.
Now,
blue-collar American women have to work.
They didn't have to in the 1950s. They don't have the option of not
supporting themselves. And it creates
this unhappiness in blue-collar women that started in the '90s and accelerated
afterward.
Men earn less but, in
that socio-educational class, Professor Carbone says, expect women to do the
housework. Women, seeing men earning
less, tend not to think that is a good idea.
So they don't get married. "The
farther down the economic ladder, the more traditional the marriage
arrangement. Both lower-class men and
women think if they get married, she's going to do the bulk of the housework.
But if they're single and just roommates, the responsibility doesn't fall to
her."
What's happened, Professor Carbone
contends, is that "marriage is kind of a status symbol for the rich
now. There's this cultural shift among
upper class, where high-status men want to marry high-status women. Their ideal partner is a professional woman
who's close to your equal (but who won't show you up)." She notes that "the only group in
American society for whom marriage rates have gone up are the top 10 percent of
women in terms of income, mainly because ultra-rich men find them so desirable."
One can make a good argument that
this trend is not good for the nation.
It is unlikely good for the children.
It is not good for the health of the men (women do better on their own
than men do). It is not good for
politics when there is a group of angry, unhappy citizens. The data are also an excellent argument for
job/retraining/educational programs.
Gary
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