Why are the always-single people healthier than the previously-married? The authors one possible explanation that is called a "stress" or "crisis" or "loss" hypothesis: "the never-married are relatively immune to any apparent disadvantage associated with the stress of marital dissolution." Translation: People who have always been single have not dealt with a marital relationship that has ended in death or divorce, so of course they are better off.
Do you see any problem with that? Can you think of any other explanation for why the always-single might fare better than the previously-married? I think this issue is so important that I am going to highlight it in a future post. So for now, think about your answers, and I'll get back to you.
The question raised by the recent findings is not just why the always-single are healthier than the previously-married, but why the difference between them has grown larger between 1972 and 2003. Why would the dissolution of a marriage be harder on people in recent years than in decades past? The authors say more research is needed, and they are right. Here's one possible hypothesis: People who got married or unmarried in 1972 were not so caught up in the Soul Mate mentality that became so prevalent later. They did not expect their spouse to be their everything - to fulfill all of their wishes and hopes and dreams. They continued to value other important people, such as friends and relatives. People from more recent times who have bought into the myth of the Soul Mate and The One, and who expect the world of that one person, and who have relegated everyone else to the back burner, are going to be crushed when that one person is gone.
There are a few other points from the study that I'd like to clarify or underscore.
1. What is the magnitude of the difference between the currently-married and the always-single? If you can access the original article (unfortunately, it is behind a pay wall), look at the graphs on the bottom of p. 247. The BIGGEST difference was for men in 1972. For the always-single men, the likelihood that they would report good or excellent health was about 89%. For the currently married men, it was about 91%. For the women, the difference was smaller than that (a few tenths of 1%) for all 32 years. (How can such a small difference be statistically meaningful? One reason is that there are more than a million people in the dataset.)
2. You may have read that "the gap between the married and the never-married is closing, especially for men." I want to clarify the "especially for men" part. Again, if you can, look at the graphs on the bottom of p. 247. The gap is closing more for men in part because it started out bigger. So in 1972, there is a bigger difference between the married men and the always-single men than there is in 2003. For women, there is a very small difference between the currently-married and the always-single at every point in time. Looking at the last year on the graphs (2003), the difference in health between the currently-married and the always-single appears to be about the same for the men as for the women.
3. Women who had always been single were healthier than men who had always been single for all 32 years. (Not a big difference.)
4. Women who had always been single were healthier than men who were currently-married; from the graphs, it appears that this was true for all 32 years as well. (Again, none of these differences are big.)
5. At the start of the study (in 1972), if you control for family income, all of the categories of unmarried people (always-single, divorced, separated, and widowed) were healthier than the currently-married. That suggests that if the currently-married people were healthier than the currently-unmarried people, it may have been because the married people had more money. If the unmarried had as much money as the married people did, they would probably have been healthier than the married people. (No, that wasn't reported anywhere either.)
The ways of presenting studies like this one are not unique to these authors. The kinds of explanations they entertain, such as the loss hypothesis, are the standard ones. The authors are, in fact, better than most. One of the points they were making in the article is that it is important to look separately at different categories of unmarried people, rather than glomming them all together. That's commendable.
The authors also end their paper in a way that is rare for scholars of marriage:
"the self-rated health status of the never-married has improved for all race and gender groups examined, and it is more similar to the married for men now than ever before, which suggests that encouraging marriage in order to promote health may be misguided. In fact, getting married increases one's risk for eventual marital dissolution, and marital dissolution seems to be worse for self-rated health now than at any point in the past three decades."
[ANSWER to the question from the last post: At the end of the last post, I predicted that you would already be able to figure out what was wrong with the first sentence of one of the press releases about the study. The sentence was: "For years, researchers have known that adults who have swapped rings say they are healthier than their never-married peers are." Of course, that's not true. People who are divorced and widowed have "swapped rings," but they are typically less healthy than people who have always been single.]
