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Single, Free, But Not So Healthy?
Single life has its charms and freedoms, but adults who never
marry may not live as long as their wedded peers, new research
suggests.
While the protective effect of marriage on health and longevity
has been pointed out before, newer research is zeroing in on the
never-married folks. Staying single all your life may not be good
for your health or your lifespan, University of California, Los
Angeles researchers have found.
The team looked at the 1997 U.S. National Death Index and the
1989 National Health Interview Survey. In 1989, almost half of
the people surveyed were married; about 10 percent were widowed;
12 percent divorced; 3 percent separated; 5 percent living with
someone; and 20 percent had never married.
Compared with married people, those who had never been married
were 58 percent more likely to have died at the end of the study's
eight-year follow up period.
By comparison, those who were widowed were nearly 40 percent
more likely to die during the follow-up than were married participants,
while those who had been divorced or separated were 27 percent
more likely to die.
Still, the UCLA researchers, who published the study in the Journal
of Epidemiology and Community Health, said the findings can't
prove cause and effect.
And other researchers say it could be a chicken-and-egg question.
Does single status lead to lack of health, or "are they single
because they are unhealthy?" asked Patrick Markey, an assistant
professor of psychology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
He and his wife, Charlotte Markey, a researcher at Rutgers University
in New Jersey, have studied the topic of marriage's effects
on health.
"Marriage, at least for males, has a huge benefit"
on health, said Patrick Markey. He and his wife looked at more
than 2,200 adults, all participants in the New Jersey Family Health
Survey, and found that being married was associated with men being
more "health proactive" -- practicing good health habits,
such as seeing the doctor regularly for check-ups.
"Marriage helps men out more than women," Markey said,
citing more results from the study, which was published in the
journal Sex Roles in 2005. Married women and single women
both tend to be "health proactive" compared with their
single peers, they found.
"I guess the (married) women may be reminding the men"
about good health practices, said Markey.
As for why single women may stay healthy despite their lack of
marriage? "Single women tend to have good social networks,"
Markey said. They have people to turn to when they need help,
typically more so than single men, he added.
But another researcher, Howard S. Friedman, a psychology professor
at the University of California, Riverside, said that singles
shouldn't necessarily expect a lack of wedding vows to shorten
their lives.
"We did not find that singles are at greater risk for premature
mortality," he said, citing his long-running research on
predictors of health and longevity.
"We found, confirming most other research, that married
men live longer -- that is, are at less risk of premature mortality
-- than divorced men, but this was not primarily due to any protective
effects of the marriage itself," he said.
"Rather, it seems both that some men are at greater
risk for poor marriages and poor health, and that poor marriages,
breakups and divorces are stressful," Friedman said.
Friedman's research also links childhood personality, especially
conscientiousness and not experiencing a parental divorce in childhood,
as predictive of longevity.
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