Marriage good for the heart, study finds
Sure, love is good for the soul. But a new study has found it’s also good for the heart.
Researchers at the University of Rochester found “happily wedded people who undergo coronary bypass surgery are more than three times as likely to be alive 15 years later as their unmarried counterparts,” Science Daily reports.
The study, published in Health Psychology, cited “marital satisfaction” as important to survival as other traditional risk factors like obesity and high blood pressure.
Men especially reap health benefits from marriage. Just being married can increase a man’s survival rate. For women, being married isn’t enough. Unhappy marriages do nothing for our survival rates, but satisfying ones can increase a woman’s survival rate almost fourfold.
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"Wives need to feel satisfied in their relationships to reap a health dividend,” explained professor of psychology Harry Reis, coauthor of the study. "But the payoff for marital bliss is even greater for women than for men."
The study tracked 225 bypass-surgery patients. The married participants were asked to rate their relationship satisfaction on a scale of “very unhappy” to “perfectly happy” one year post-surgery.
The results were stunning:
Fifteen years after surgery, 83 per cent of happily wedded women were still alive. Only 28 per cent of unhappily married women and 27 per cent of unmarried women were still alive.
Eighty-three per cent of happy husbands were still alive. Only 60 per cent of unhappily married men and 26 per cent of unmarried men made the 15-year mark.
Why such a remarkable boost in survival rates?
“We figured that people who were married would have some advantage, but we didn’t expect it to be 2.5-to-three times more,” Kathleen King, the lead author, told The Toronto Star. “Part of our hypotheses is that if you’re happily married, your spouse may be more willing to give you advice and you might be more likely to take it. If you are unhappily married, your spouse is going to think you’re nagging.”
She adds a supportive spouse can also provide sustained motivation to their partner to “stick around so they can stay in the relationship that they like.”
To the singles hating this study, feel free to interrupt conversations about the research with this: marriage makes us fat.
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