| As a younger, single man
one of my favorite poems was “Marriage,” written
by Gregory Corso, a Beat Generation poet. The piece begins
with the questions, “Should I get married? Should
I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit
and faustus hood?” The poet goes on for eight verses
arguing, with insight and humor, for and against entering
into the bonds of matrimony. As you’d expect of
an iconoclast such as Corso, he is not wholeheartedly
in favor of marriage. He’s not completely against
it either, holding out the impossibly romantic notion
of a woman he’d be willing to wait 2000 years for.
Needless to say, none of his lines of reasoning is about
the health effects of marriage.
It’s been irrefutably demonstrated
that, on average, married people enjoy better health and
a longer life than unmarried folks. In my research for
this piece, I read medical journal articles from England,
Australia, China and the United States. Every one of them
found that the married are healthier and live longer than
the un-betrothed.
Single men fare worse than single women. I won’t
guess why, except to observe that in so many ways females
are so much tougher than males. Young men who have never
been married are worst off, in part explained by this
group’s statistics being skewed by AIDS. Next worst
off are widowers over 80, whose death rate is about double
that of their hitched brethren. A 2005 Australian study
noted a 20 percent greater likelihood of heart and lung
disease, diabetes, cancer and even arthritis in unmarried
people 51 to 61 years old than in their married cohorts.
And so it goes. Literally, every health statistic I could
find shows the benefit of being married.
People who stay married are also way better off financially,
especially in old age. Then there are the children. Even
when parents are not happy with each other, their kids
do better on average. They’re healthier; stay in
school longer; turn into better-adjusted adults.
Nobody really knows how it is that marriage is good for
your health, which, as you’d expect, will not in
any way keep me from speculating about it. My arguments
come down to two big categories: taking better care of
oneself, and experiencing a lower stress level.
My experience after I got a total knee replacement last
fall is a good illustration of the difference a spouse
can make to a person’s health. As a matter of course,
I tend to follow my doctor’s orders. Still, having
my wife there to nurse and support me during the six weeks
from hospital discharge to return to work made a huge
difference in my recovery. Thanks to her, I ate better;
got feedback on when I was pushing myself too hard; and
received a lot of plain-vanilla, tender loving care that
helped with my mobility, pain, sleep and attitude.
Married people eat better. They smoke less. Drink less.
Have more money to pay for medical care. Thanks in part
to the attention of their spouse, they tend to consult
a doctor earlier if they have symptoms. Old folks especially
benefit from the support of an intimate partner, including
staying out of the nursing home.
In all sorts of concrete ways, throughout the course of
their marriage, couples manage to take better care of
themselves and of each other than single people do. They
also experience lower levels of stress. Loneliness is
stressful. We humans are social creatures. Immersed in
a complex culture, we depend on a dense fabric of connections
to fellow creatures for our very survival.
A person who is limited to a nexus of merely superficial
relationships may not be connected enough to have a very
good shot at health and happiness. One school of consciousness
theory posits that human awareness and emotion cannot
even develop in the absence of a certain level of linguistic
interaction in childhood.
Marriage, if for no other reason than its “until
death do us part” vow, certainly offers the greatest
potential for deep interaction over the years. There’s
something to be said for the quantity of time spent in
the same space, smelling the same smells, hearing the
same sounds. A cohabiting woman and a man (or a woman
and a woman, or a man and a man) tend to synchronize their
emotional states. Physiological studies show that couples
who live together even match some of their hormonal rhythms.
Such a profound level of connection is good for you. It
lowers stress and releases pleasure hormones.
To be sure, there are challenges and stresses to staying
married. Anybody who’s ever been a spouse understands.
Matrimony may provide pretty good insurance against loneliness.
But how about boredom? Or sexual temptation? Have hundreds
of thousands of years of homo sapiens evolution, when
our life span was under three decades, really prepared
us to celebrate golden anniversaries as a matter of course?
The 50 percent divorce rate in the United States certainly
attests to how rough and long a row marriage can be to
hoe. My wife and I used to have a cartoon on our refrigerator
that featured an old, frumpy, scowling couple standing
together before the pearly gates. One of them (it doesn’t
matter which) is saying, “I distinctly remember
saying, ‘Til death do us part.’”
Speaking now, not as a doctor but as a husband of 29 years:
you betcha marriage is tough and you betcha it’s
worth it. Matrimony has brought depths to my life that
I could not experience any other way.
I’d like to close with the eloquent words spoken
at a wedding presided over by an old friend, Larry Rosenwald.
He is a literature professor who, as a citizen of Massachusetts,
has been able to acquire a license as a “solemnizer”
to perform one marriage ceremony per year. In Larry’s
words:
“I’d like to offer one reflection, a piece
of advice or counsel, as a person who’s been married
for 30 years and who’s committed to staying married
till my wife and I are parted by death. And the reflection
is this: what undergirds a marriage isn’t just love,
or affection, or mutual respect, or affinity, or the fine
qualities of each partner. A deeper foundation is the
willingness to acknowledge that your partner is really
a different person than you are, and to undertake the
adventure, and the discipline, of getting to know that
other person on his or her own terms, and not on yours.
And a deeper foundation still is making a commitment to
staying married on principle, to holding fast to the beautiful
and powerful words you’re about to say. There’ll
be bad days, though I wish you as few of them as any couple
in human history has ever had; and on those bad days,
it’s the recognition of otherness and the commitment
to a reciprocal bond that, in my experience at any rate,
gets you through and beyond those days, and on into days
of joy.”
These days, at least when it comes to marriage, I tend
to lean more toward Rosenwald than I do toward Corso.
Marc Ringel has spent the majority of
his career as a family doctor working in rural communities,
including the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has
written extensively, for lay and professional audiences,
about rural health, medical informatics and healing.
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