We Thought Marriage Made Us Healthier, and Why We Were Wrong
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
This seems flawed because you get older as you get married, which is generally something that makes you less healthy.
This does not seem to compare health between a cohort that stayed single and a cohort that got married, so I don’t place a lot of value on the conclusions.
> Marital Status: The main independent variable is a time‐varying measure of marital status at each interview, calculated from marriage dates in the 1985–2011 PSID marital history file. Observations were censored after the end of a first marriage to focus on health difference between married and never‐married adults. To account for cumulative health effects of marriage (Dupre and Meadows, [ 12] ), this variable distinguishes among being never married; being in a first marriage formed 0–4 years ago; being in a first marriage formed 5–9 years ago; and being in a first marriage formed 10 or more years ago. An alternative specification of this variable as continuous duration in the first marriage (equaling 0 in never‐married observations) led to the same findings.
> (Partial results): In OLS models for both men and women, any duration of marriage is significantly associated with a better (i.e., lower) score on the health scale, compared to remaining never married. The random‐effects models assess whether this association persists after controlling for respondents’ heterogeneity in underlying health status. With the addition of random intercepts, both the men's and women's models continue to show statistically significant associations between all marital durations and better health, relative to remaining unmarried, but the magnitude of the marriage coefficients is one‐third to one‐half smaller than the OLS estimates. Finally, the fixed‐effects models test whether within‐person change in marital status or marital duration is associated with improvement in general health. Among men, no such association is evident, while among women, only a weak protective effect of being married for 10 or more years is supported by the fixed‐effects model. While the latter finding is consistent with the accumulation of a protective marital effect at longer marital durations, the fixed‐effects coefficient (−0.06) is approximately half as large as the coefficients in the random effects or OLS models. Therefore, considering all birth cohorts together, within‐person improvements in health are weakly attributable to long marriages among women, but are not caused by accumulation of time in marriage among men.
Sure, let's ask people how they feel about their health before and after and call it scientific.
It doesn't take much for someone to sacrifice their health for something – whether it's for a job, leisurely activities, stress eating, or just not caring.
Marriage adds more reasons on top of this. You've found your mate, so less incentive to go to the gym / stay in shape. You've just had a kid, so less time overall to do so, and (especially!) less sleep in general, which causes all sorts of problems.
Can anyone recall a "marriage makes you healthier" trope? Seems like a straw-man to me?
This is a common trope, like the boomer "I hate my wife" meme, but it's such a bad attitude. For us, it's been more incentive to stay in shape. You have someone that you care about, and it's unfair to them to pull a bait-and-switch and get fat after you've committed to each other. Your spouse deserves to be married to a hottie. Also you should want to be around and in good health for each other and your kids for as long as you can.
We both quit drinking when we started having kids. Her for obvious reasons. Me for solidarity I suppose, but then also because once they're here, they're a 12 hour job every day, and you never know if they'll wake up and need you after bedtime, so there's no good time for alcohol anyway.
What I'm doing is merely listing the common reasons why the trend is what it is. Exceptional people will likely stay exceptional.
I mean if you met your spouse at the gym its probably a reason to keep going. It's a common activity you both enjoyed when single so you still enjoy it as a couple.
Running after kids should keep in you in shape as well. Although I guess you could just watch TV with them all day but that's not dependent on having a kid.
If people who lack fitness somehow get by accident into marriage they divorce with higher probability or die earlier or both. There is the saying "a married man does not live longer, for him life just feels longer".
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031593
> Prior research makes competing predictions regarding whether marital satisfaction is positively or negatively associated with weight gain. The health regulation model suggests that satisfying relationships facilitate the functions of marriage that promote health. Thus, spouses should be most likely to gain weight when either partner is less satisfied because marital strain causes stress that interferes with self-regulatory behaviors. The mating market model, in contrast, suggests that weight maintenance is motivated primarily by the desire to attract a mate. Thus, spouses should be least likely to gain weight when either partner is less satisfied because they should feel an increased need to attract a new mate. This longitudinal study of 169 newlywed couples evaluated each possibility.
> Conclusions: These findings challenge the idea that quality relationships always benefit health, suggesting instead that spouses in satisfying relationships relax their efforts to maintain their weight because they are no longer motivated to attract a mate. Interventions to prevent weight gain in early marriage may therefore benefit from encouraging spouses to think about their weight in terms of health rather than appearance.
We believe married people “have someone” and single people do not. But research has shown that it is single people who more often maintain their ties with friends, neighbors, siblings and parents. In contrast, couples tend to turn inward after they marry, paying less attention to their friends and parents. Married people have “the one,” but single people have “the ones.”
And of the few friends I've known well long enough to see them both single and married, it's become quite apparent that they have a tendency to enable one another to do unhealthy things. For example, one half will decide they want to drink less, but the other half keeps bringing home six packs of beer and drinking in front of them. It's pretty rare IME for both parties to be coordinated in these wagon rides, so there's more temptation in the home to keep falling off the wagon, because the other half isn't on board.
There's also the obvious cycle of single people working hard to make themselves lose weight and get that beach bod going. Once they're hooked up and living with someone, IME it's practically without fail that they get lazy and fatten up.
For me, it's a whole lot easier to stay fit and maintain that physique and not have shitty foods in my home without someone else interfering with my plans. I'm quite confident my long-term health is probably better off without another American sharing my living space. It would be an exceptional American for it not to be true, and I'm just not that skilled in attracting such a catch. It would be a huge failure to let in one of the averages.
I'd also like to note that there is the possibility of LTR/marriage without cohabitating. It's just costly, but from where I'm sitting that looks like the far better approach if one can afford it. It's not that uncommon to hear about such arrangements among celebrities who obviously have the necessary dough.
Before the pandemic started I was pretty isolated for a couple years solo developing an off-grid desert property, which turned into another ~2 years of absolute solitude from the COVID lock-downs. Without access to the public in the form of cafes/bars or even the public library, it became noticeably mentally and emotionally problematic. While it's nice to know what that extreme looks like and how it negatively affects me, I have no interest in repeating the experience.
For me, just having the ability to hack from a cafe at least several times a month and have some conversations with even random strangers provides the majority of the human interaction I require. Beyond that it's diminishing returns land.
Yep, same here.
> And of the few friends I've known well long enough to see them both single and married, it's become quite apparent that they have a tendency to enable one another to do unhealthy things.
I've said exactly this before, even in my current marriage (that we enable bad habits in each other).
I might try to eat healthier, but she's having a bad day and wants to eat garbage, or I'm stressed at work and not caring as much and make bad decisions. She often wants things that I wouldn't bother getting on my own as well, like a daily Starbucks or late night ice cream, and while it's easy for me to not have that stuff if I don't go to those places, it's much harder for me to choose something healthy when I do go (like going to Oberweis and getting something for her and not me can be hard to do. I still don't about half the time, but the other half I'm like screw it and get something).
And I try to eat healthier meals, like just make a salad for dinner or something, but when I do that I often still have to cook something since she only tolerates salads with a 'proper cooked meal', and then it's hard for me to spend an hour or more cooking something or picking up takeout for her and then not eat it also.
It's a tradeoff that we've been on the wrong side of more often than I'd like, and I'm trying to get things back on track, but then something happens that throws it off course again inevitably.
When I was by myself I don't remember it being anywhere near this difficult. Just buy some salad fixings and don't go out, just make that for lunch or whatever. Having to also work with someone else with different tastes (at least when it comes to healthy options) makes it much more difficult.
It was also difficult when I was living with my parents also and trying to diet while they did their own thing, so it's not something that's exclusive to my wife or anything.
I didn't realize my comment amounted to hatred just because I don't want the average (or worse) domestic to share a home with me.
Where is it better? Do they speak English there and have open borders to an unmarried American male in his 40s? Honest questions.
Japan is on my radar, but they're notoriously difficult in the immigration department, and I don't speak the language. Not that I'm looking for a partner or whatever there, I just find their traditional practices of doing more on the floor appealing. In the US I'm an extreme weirdo for not using furniture.
When we were traveling around Scandinavia, on couple of occasions we stayed next to business centers on weekdays, once in Stockholm and once in Reykjavik. In the morning when I realized that there was a bunch of IT companies, while my wife was trying to arrange us some tourist stuff I was walking around and thinking if I should just go door to door and see if anyone has a job opening.
Typically countries and other states don't impress me that much when I travel as a tourist and I don't fall for "the food is so nice and people are so friendly" argument, but Iceland and Sweden, specifically Stockholm, really made an impression on me.
So yeah, Scandinavia, Northern Europe and maybe Canada? I have met a lot of Easter Europeans, Asians and some Americans there in seemingly all professions, not only specialized skills, so there must be some immigration pathways.
Back in the Nokia N900 era I had an employment opportunity to hack on Linux stuff with them, but it required relocating from my home (at the time) in Illinois to Finland, which they were willing to facilitate. I was keen on the opportunity, until I looked at weather and income. There are some very good reasons I'm in California today...
But I admit you're not the first person to suggest Scandinavian options in this subject. Readers struggling with these issues who don't mind the weather would probably do well to explore those options further.