This author's book, Singled Out, exposes many of these pro-marriage biases in articles relating marital status to health. Who would ever guess the real results of the study from the incredibly biased headlines that get released by the mainstream media? Keep it up, Bella DePaulo; people need to have their eyes opened on these ongoing fallacies and distortions.

Once again, Bella's penchant for scientific scrutiny reveals that there's always more to these one-sided, biased, and usually inaccurate, assertions. The blood pressure article's reasoning would be comparable to saying: "Buy a sports car, have an exciting life."

Thank you, Bella. Keep up the great work.

I suspect the real answer to the lower dips at night part of the study will lead in directions that "Marriage for Everyone" websites won't pursue: that sleeping with someone, as long as it's not someone you're in conflict with, is helpful in lowering your blood pressure. Then there's the question of whether you have to sleep with a human, or if, say, 85 lbs of golden retriever will suffice.

[I've got to point out, as I did on my own blog, that the Society for Behavioral Medicine and its publisher, Springer, are charging the public $32 for access to this paper. How retro.]

Thanks, everyone, for your comments. Funny about the golden retriever. A friend just e-mailed me saying that she sleeps with her dog and her cat at her side, and neither of them argues with her before bedtime! To Fully Grown Single: Because of your comments on my Living Single posts, I've just discovered your blog. Thanks for that! --Bella

Yet another totally irrelevant reason women still think they have to have a wedding to lead a healthy fulfilling life, thanks for disbanding the stereotypes. I've been happier since my divorce than I ever was before or during my marriage, and by the way, my blood pressure is great!

I appreciate your debunking of the media reports and, to some extent, the survey design itself. And you make a number of excellent observations both by examining the results reported in the original study and by looking at what the study failed to ask. But I think your own critique could be improved.

First, knowing nothing about blood pressure measurements, I have no idea, and you make no effort to explain, whether a 3-point dip at night has any significant effect on overall health. you suggest that what matters is "what I thought I was learning." well, what I thought I was learning was that there was some effect on the subject's health. And you don't address that issue, except to imply (perhaps correctly) that it doesn't have any health effect. But if that is true, say so directly; don't just imply it. And if there is reason to think a consistent 3-point drop is beneficial, then acknowledge that.

Second, you say it's "unethical" to assign people randomly to get married or stay single. This is absurd. It's impossible, not unethical. And obviously a blind study would be impossible, as there's no possible placebo. So this part of the discussion is simply a waste of space.

Third, you are absolulely right about the poor design in focusing only on the "happily" married. To be done right, the study must also focus only the "happily" single, and must use essentially the same criteria to establish happiness in both instances.

As to your observation about the chicken-egg problem (who knows if the "happily married" already lower blood pressure before marriage) - I must say that on the basis of the evidence in the study itself (as you characterize that evidence), this seems most implausible. There is a category of people who consistently have a 3-point drop in blood pressure, only while they are slpeeing, and those are the people who got happily married? But if even if you suppose that this is plausible, the criticism seems weak. If it's true that the same thing that lowers nocturnal blood pressure causes people to get married happily, then there's a correlation even if not causation, and so by hypothesis there's potentially a causative factor that prodocues both outcomes in tandem. The lack of causation, of course, shows that it's a mistake to conclude that getting married will lower your blood pressure, but that is obvius in any case.

last, as to question you end with -- the question that the study didn't address -- this is an excellent idea, and it seems worth constructing a survey that remedies this defect.