B. Even allowing for the approach that makes marriage look better than it really is, the differences in health between the currently-married and the always-single are tiny. By the last year of the study (2003), the probability of reporting good health was about .928 for the currently married and about .926 for the always-single. If it is easier to think in terms of percentages, that means that about 92.8% of currently-married people said their health was good or excellent, compared to about 92.6% of always-single people. So the headlines saying that married people are still the healthiest are touting a difference of about two-tenths of one percent. And remember, that advantage did NOT come from getting married (as I explain below). Is that 0.2% what you imagined when you read headlines claiming that married people are the healthiest?

C. For the African-Americans, by 2003, there was no difference at all between the health of the currently-married and the always-single.

D. Women who had always been single were healthier than men who were currently married. In 2003, the likelihood that always-single women would report good or excellent health was about 92.8. For currently-married men, it was about 91.8. (This wasn't noted in any of the media reports I found.)

THE MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION

The authors crunched data collected over 32 years (from 1972 through 2003) from more than a million people, so this is a study worth taking seriously. Importantly, the same people were NOT followed that whole time. Each year, a different set of people participated. They described their overall perceptions of their own health, on a scale ranging from poor to excellent. Those reports were then linked to their marital status.

The key question was: How has the health of the different groups changed over the 32 years? So, for example, if you compared the health of the currently-married participants in 1972 to the health of the currently-married participants in 1973 and every other year up to the final one (2003), what would the change over time look like?

For the people who had always been single (or "never-married," as they are more often called), the answer was clear. Whether male or female, Black or white, their health steadily improved over time. The same could not be said for any of the other marital status groups (currently married, divorced, separated, or widowed).

Sounds good for singles, except when you keep in mind the headline. Sure, singles are doing better now than they were a few years ago, but they are still not as good as married people. The Washington Post headline was even more stark: "Married Folks Still the Healthiest." Singles did not even get the Most Improved Player Award in that story title.

The currently married people actually were the healthiest in most (though not all) of the analyses, so what's my problem? (You just know that I have one.) It is the implication that they are the healthiest because they got married (e.g., "marriage benefits health"). Again, sadly, the Washington Post was one of the worst offenders, recruiting an "expert" not involved in the study to comment, "This study provides confirmation that marriage does tend to make people healthier." Of course, it does nothing of the sort.

In my last post, I reprinted a section from the "Science and the Single Person" chapter of my book, Singled Out, to explain why studies like these do not and cannot demonstrate that getting married makes people healthier (or happier or anything else). I'll do a quick recap here, but you may want to go back to that post (or to the book) for more details.

Here's the hypothetical example I like to use. Suppose a drug company did a study in which they let people decide for themselves whether to take the new drug (rather than randomly assigning them to a drug condition or a placebo condition). They also let people quit taking the drug whenever they wanted to. Some people started taking the drug and hated it, so they were removed from the Drug group and set aside into a different group (No Drug - intolerable). Others started taking the drug but eventually lost access to it (No Drug - withdrawn). The drug company removed them from the key Drug condition and set them aside, too.

So now the drug company takes the data from only those people who started on the drug and stayed on it. It compares how good those people felt to how good everyone else felt - the people who never did take the drug, those who hated it and stopped taking it, and those who were cut off from the drug. Their conclusion? Our drug works! Yeah!!! Everyone should take our drug and then they will feel so much better.

That's the logic of all of these studies of marital status that are not longitudinal (i.e., that do not follow the same people over a number of years as they get married, get unmarried, or stay single). You can claim that getting married is good for you, as long as you do not count the people who got married and found it not so good at all.

A previous study further illustrates how currently married people can end up with the best health scores even though getting married did NOT make them healthier. This is a study that was longitudinal: 10,000 people were followed for more than 4 years. They found that the married people who had more health problems early in the study were nearly twice as likely to divorce by the end of the study. See how this works? The married people who have health problems are more likely to get divorced. So now they are taken out of the married group and put into the unmarried group. The people who are left in the married group now have fewer health problems than the others. But that's not because they got married. Getting married did not cause them to get healthier. Getting unhealthy seemed to motivate some of the married people to get divorced.

I'm not saying that getting married never results in getting healthy. I am saying that there are lots of ways to account for results from the recent study and others like it. Typically, in our matrimaniacal culture, interpretations that make married people look better are favored over others, even when there is no good scientific reason to do so.

The marriage-centered point of view is evident not just in the framing of the results, but in the speculations that are offered to account for them. Let me illustrate with another finding. Over time, the health of people in the divorced, separated, and especially the widowed group got even worse. So, from 1972 to 2003, the health of people who had always been single looks better and better, while the health of the previously married looks worse. By the last year of the study (2003), the people who had always been single had a health advantage over the previously married that was greater than it had ever been before.

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Tags: better health, black singles, blacks and whites, bogus media reports, bottom line, divorce, good health, headlines, health, longitudinal research, marital mythol, marital status, marriage, marriage studies, matrimania, media, media spotlight, men and women, methodological issues, percentages, single men, single women, singled out, singles, singlism, soul mate, tenths, washington post, widowhood