Today's Singles-Bashing Question: "Does Marriage Make You Smarter?"

A few days ago, my inbox lit up with e-mails from brilliant single people alerting me to the latest outbreak of singlism in the media - the rash of stories suggesting that if you want lower blood pressure, you should "walk down the aisle." After reading the original research report, I learned that this claim (like so many of the other matrimaniacal "findings" that I investigated for my book, Singled Out) was more fictitious than real. I wrote about it here.

I was headed happily back to the work that I had set aside, when my inbox again began emitting distress calls. "Matrimania jumps on the neurobabble bandwagon!" one of them declared. I followed a link and ended up at the MSNBC.com website where the taunting question about marriage and intelligence appeared. The story was kind of dopey and vacuous, so I searched for the original article in Prevention magazine. That version added a subheading in response to the question, "Does Marriage Make You Smarter?": "The latest science says: I do." [Grammatically, this sounds a bit like Stephen Colbert's book title, I Am America (And So Can You!), but I digress.]

Beyond the spoiler subheading, the Prevention article was identical to the one posted on the MSNBC website. How many people were in the study? No indication. Who were they? Doesn't say. To whom were the married people (who ostensibly got smarter) compared? Did the research follow people who were single and then got married to see if they did in fact get smarter after they married? What was the measure of intelligence?

There were no answers to any of these questions. Instead, we get a story that starts with the author waxing poetic about his wife. He's smitten with her, he says, because "she is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge" - everything from "interior design to 18th-century epic poetry and primitive art." (If you were to observe all marriages, do you think more of them would resemble this one or the TV union of Edith and Archie Bunker?)

The only "evidence" described in support of the claim that marriage makes you smarter was this one sentence: "one area of the brain that lights up in these later stages of love is the cortex, the same place where information is stored and rational decisions are made."

Unconvinced? Then you are probably single - and stupid!

I don't know of any study that measured intelligence over time as single people married, to see whether they really did become smarter. The closest I can come to some relevant research is a study in which intelligence was measured during high school, and the students' marital status was recorded for the subsequent 36 years.

The author, Nadine Marks, had data from more than 10,000 students who graduated from high schools in Wisconsin in 1957. When she looked at their marital status around age 54, she found that for the women (but not the men), those who were married were less intelligent than those who were divorced or separated or had always been single.

Oh, and by the way, the same study of thousands of people also looked at health. There was no disadvantage for single women or men.

How about some headlines about that study?