Who Wants to Live Longer? Say, ‘I Do’

Last month, my younger brother, Terry, and his girlfriend, Vickie, eloped. They flew to Las Vegas, went to one of those cheesy chapels and were married by an Elvis impersonator. Terry’s a lucky guy. His bride is not only a charming, lovely woman but--are you ready?--she doesn’t mind watching baseball on TV.

Terry’s fortunate for another reason, since he may have just added years to his life. With the wedding season underway, it seems a good time to examine a well-established medical phenomenon: Married men live longer than single guys. The science is indisputable. Study after study, dating back at least a century, has concluded that if you want to stretch out your golden years, getting hitched isn’t a bad idea. While both men and women appear to gain psychological benefits when they acquire a wedding band, getting married actually improves a guy’s physical health too. Consider:

* A 1992 study in the International Journal of Epidemiology followed more than 3,300 middle-aged Dutch men for a decade. In the end, unmarried guys were 70% more likely to be dead than married men. They were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack.

* A few years later, British researchers also found that unmarried guys had a greater risk of dying young when they tracked 8,000 men for 11 years. Men who became divorced during the course of the study were four times more likely to die than men who stayed married.

* A 1998 Danish study found that men with colon cancer survive longer if they’re married. And last year, Canadian researchers found that elderly people who are married are far less likely to suffer from dementia or to be institutionalized than unmarried people.

What’s going on here? Could part of the problem be that unwed men behave badly--and pay the ultimate price? Well, yes, says University of Chicago sociologist Linda J. Waite.

“Men do really badly single,” says Waite, coauthor, with Maggie Gallagher, of “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier & Better Off Financially,” to be published by Doubleday in September. Some bachelors take perfectly good care of themselves, she concedes, but even more drink too much, mess around with drugs, eat junky food and engage in other unhealthy habits.

After marriage, “men clean up their acts,” Waite says, “because their wives insist on it.”

She cites ongoing research at the University of Michigan that follows men and women after they graduate from high school and tracks them until age 32, studying their marital status and lifestyle. The study indicates that unhealthy behaviors, such as excessive drinking and drug abuse, are far more common among men who remain single. “Women create structure for men,” says Waite, who has been married to the same man for 28 years.

Now wait just a minute, Dr. Waite, I interrupted. I thought this was the 21st century. Haven’t a lot of women quit hanging around the house, creating structure for their husbands, and gone out and gotten jobs? Sure, she responded, explaining that it’s not the pampering delivered by a full-time homemaker--cooking dinner and doing the laundry--that confers health benefits in a marriage. Simply having someone to come home to fosters a healthy routine, she believes. “If a man is married, he’s more likely to be home at 6:30 every night, even if he’s the one making dinner.”

Furthermore, says Waite, marriage also provides both men and women with a key psychological benefit: someone to talk to when you’re upset or anxious. Simply having a person who’ll listen--or at least pretend to listen--when you blow off steam lowers stress levels, she says.

Plenty of evidence suggests that chronically high stress levels raise blood pressure and weaken the immune system, in addition to causing other health problems. So if you’re doing more shouting than talking with your spouse, staying married may harm your health more than help it.

Having a spouse appears to be less critical for women; single women, whether never married, divorced or widowed, are more likely to seek out other women for social support. Solo-flying males, meanwhile, are less likely to flock together and talk about difficult feelings.

She adds that there’s no way of knowing whether being in a committed relationship improves health for gay men and lesbians, since the studies haven’t been done. However, Waite says, research shows that most unmarried men and women who live together don’t provide one another with the same level of psychological support enjoyed by their married friends--unless they get engaged, that is.

I can’t say for certain that I’d be a flabby, chain-smoking lush today if I hadn’t gotten married 10 years ago. But I’d guess that living with a loving and supportive woman all this time sure hasn’t hurt. Even if she doesn’t like watching baseball.

Timothy Gower is the author of “Staying at the Top of Your Game” (Avon Books, 1999). He can be reached at [email protected]. The Healthy Man runs the second Monday of each month.