“You make me sick”: Can that be literally true?
by Mira and Charles on April 21st, 2010Is marriage good for your health?
Well, is it? Is marriage good for your health? It matters what the answer to this question is. A lot of us are wondering whether we should or shouldn’t get married or get out of being married. We know a lot rides on our decision. The wrong answer could mean the difference between a lifetime of misery and a lifetime of joy. But how do we sort it all out?
This question mattered a lot to us back when we were starting work on Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. At the time we’d been working exclusively to help couples stay together. This was based on our belief that there was an “exquisite wisdom” (in the words of one of the founders of family therapy, Carl Whitaker) in the choice people make of a partner. Who were we to argue with that?
So we thought. But it had been getting increasingly clear that we were helping some people stay in marriages that really weren’t very good. We’d helped make them a lot better, but they still weren’t good enough to make the people very happy.
And that led to the research that resulted in Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. It had become clear that people were happier and better off leaving bad marriages and staying in good ones. Worst of all was staying ambivalent, never being able to decide what to do, never able to commit to the marriage, never able to move on.
The only issue was how to decide whether to stay or leave, and that’s what the book was all about. We know that book made a lot of people’s lives a lot better. But one question nagged us. The research we were aware of when we wrote it seemed to show that being married was better for your health than being single. This worried us. Even if people were happier getting out of a bad marriage, what if they weren’t actually healthier?
Well, there is now a lot of new research on this subject, and much of this research is discussed in a terrific New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope (an excellent journalist—we mentioned one of her pieces on the American family today in an earlier blog).
Here are the bullet points:
– In general, marriage is good for your health.
To quote the Times article, “Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the
But—and there’s a big but coming—the health advantage marriage gives you applies only to good marriages. It’s like with food: yes, food is good for you, but only good food. Bad food is bad for you. And it’s the same with marriage. So:
– Bad relationships are bad for your health.
Again quoting the article: “Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced… ‘When we divide good marriages from bad ones,’ says the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who is also the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, ‘we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.’”
In addition, “Other researchers have also studied how the ‘drip, drip’ of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. In 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a three-year Swedish study of 300 women who had been hospitalized with severe chest pains or a heart attack; the study found that those who reported the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times as likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure. It is notable that these increased risks weren’t associated with other forms of stress. For instance, women who were stressed-out at work weren’t at any higher risk for a second episode of heart problems than women who were happy in their jobs.”
Yeah, that’s right. In this study, work stress didn’t hurt your health, but marriage stress did.
Some of the studies that demonstrated this dug right down to the physiological level. For example, in one study that looked at the effect of relationships on the immune system, we find that “After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.”
There’s more: “the emotional tone of a marital fight turned out to be just as predictive of poor heart health as whether the individual smoked or had high cholesterol. It is worth noting that the couples in Smith’s study were all relatively happy. These were husbands and wives who loved each other. Yet many of them had developed styles of conflict that took a physical toll on each other. The solution, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to fight more thoughtfully. ‘Difficulties in marriage seem to be nearly universal,’ he said. ‘Just try not to let fights be any nastier than they need to be.’”
And so “couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples. The results may also have practical relevance for surgical patients, for instance, waiting for incisions to heal. But most important, the study offered compelling evidence that a hostile fight with your husband or wife isn’t just bad for your relationship. It can have a profound toll on your body.”
And some of the negative health effects last after divorce. Bad marriages are one of those gifts that keep in giving.
What does this mean for you? It’s not just a big duuuuh—of course you should try to have a good marriage. It gets at the issue of priorities. These findings mean that you should make it a big priority to have a happy relationship. The health benefits—physical health benefits—of having a good marriage far, far outweigh the benefits of, say, eating organic over conventionally grown produce. As the article says, “couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, ‘you’re better off out of it.’”
The operative word here is work. We go nuts trying to squeeze in an extra five minutes of exercise, but we do almost nothing to make our relationships better. I know all about it. People come to me to help them fix their troubled marriages, but they almost always come too late, when things are really bad. It’s the relationship equivalent of going to the gym only when it requires a piano mover to get you out of bed in the morning.
This is even more important when we consider the following finding:
– Getting divorced is better for you than staying in a bad marriage, but fixing the bad marriage is best of all.
Let’s go right to the article: In one important study, “remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. ‘I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,’ says Linda J. Waite, a
– Bottom line: Choose wisely and carefully before you get married, and while you should NOT stick around in a clearly bad marriage, you should do everything you can to make it better before you decide to leave.
We’ve spent much of our professional lives working with these issues. We’ve always known the score, but it’s nice to have new data to confirm what our own research and clinical experience showed. That’s why we wrote the books we did.
Is He Mr. Right? was designed precisely to help people know which new relationships will develop into happy marriages and which ones won’t. (Note: the book is marketed towards women, but the material in it applies to men just as much. We have a lot of satisfied straight male readers!)
Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad will help you do what these studies show is so important: make your marriage better. It will make it possible for you to zero in on just what the difficulty is and fix that. Imagine: you’ll save time and have your best shot at making your relationship better. And speaking of time, our book The Weekend Marriage will help you understand just how to have a good marriage when you’re faced with the time-starved lifestyle that affects all of us so terribly.
Last but not least, Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay will give you everything you need to make the crucial stay-or-go decision once you’ve decided you can’t do anything more to improve your relationship.
And if you need the kind of help you can only get working with a talented, experienced, down-to-earth therapist, contact us here at The Chestnut Hill Institute. There is no need to suffer.
