Hypochondriacs should all marry immediately. Since 1858, studies have consistently shown that married people live longer and are at lower risk of cancer, heart disease, depression, pneumonia, substance abuse, suicide, dementia…you name it.
According to Dr. Scott Haltzman, a psychiatrist at Brown University, a married man with heart disease lives an average of nearly four years longer than an unmarried man with a healthy heart. And a 2013 study using National Cancer Institute data found that married people lived longer after a cancer diagnosis than did people who were unmarried.
What the studies forget to add is that the “marriage benefit” applies mainly to happily married people, because the chronic stress of an unhappy marriage is horrible for your health. So is divorce, and those who are widowed often see their own health abruptly plummet.
There are the other qualifiers: Single women with a supportive network of friends and family do quite well. The real problem’s all those guys resistant to leaning on something called a support network. They don’t get regular checkups and screenings on their own. They don’t pour out their worries at bedtime. They face every crisis and sorrow alone.
Dr. Dean Rosen, a local psychologist in private practice, adds an even bigger qualifier to the celebration of marriage: “Being married is correlated with better health, but we don’t know if it causes it.” In other words, maybe it’s not so much that marriage makes you healthier but instead that healthier people are more likely to marry—because they’re optimists, or they take risks, or they take better care of themselves and have the kind of psychological maturity needed to sustain a long-term relationship.
Bottom line, loneliness and hostility are the killers. An unhappy marriage shoots the risk of heart attack right up again. In one recent study, an irritable, discontented marriage was as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And sociologists recently found that long, bad marriages put older women, especially, at greater risk of heart disease.
Researchers Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser (yes, they’re married) found that women in unhappy relationships had weaker immune responses than did those in happy relationships. In another study, they gave couples hot-button topics to discuss and found that those who argued with the greatest hostility showed the largest declines in immune system function.
Study after study has shown that it’s easier to get sick and harder to heal if you’re in a relationship that’s rife with conflict.
If you trust the people you love, though, “you can let out things that you might suppress in your public everyday self,” Rosen notes. A friend or partner helps regulate your negative emotions; you don’t have to do it all by yourself. The body registers the difference instantly: When University of Virginia researchers administered mild electric shocks to happily married women, their brains showed less stress response when they were holding their husbands’ hands.
Friendship can be just as beneficial, Rosen says: “That’s why I think single people have to put more effort into building and developing good friendships. That was the strength of the gay community before marriage was legal. And something else we know is that a sure sign of a bad marriage is fewer friendships. People get stuck being unhappy with each other.”
