"Myth #1
MARRIAGE GUARANTEES A LONGER LIFE."

Good Morning America and Nightline link to an excerpt from the book, including this:

"Get married and you will live longer. (Myth!)"

Atlantic magazine (the quote is from Howard Friedman's answers to one of the magazine's questions):

"One of our longevity myths is 'Get married, and you will live longer.' The data tell a different story."

All of the quotes above are from 2011. Now see if you can identify the date (and for extra credit, the author) of the next excerpt. It originally occurred in the context of critiquing a claim made by two other authors (who also got a lot of attention) that getting married results in a longer life:

"They skip over what is probably the longest-running study ever conducted - the Terman Life-Cycle Study. It started in 1921, with 1,528 eleven-year-olds."

Yeah, I said that in Singled Out (on p. 52), originally published in 2006. I wish I could say that my myth-busting in that section changed the conventional wisdom about marriage and longevity, but I think I just put a few dents in it. Maybe now, with all of the attention that The Longevity Project is getting, that myth will be down for the count (or at least knocked out for a while).

I have The Longevity Project, and of course I went straight to the chapter on getting married and (not) living longer. I think there are ways in which the authors actually understated the ways in which that myth is misleading and wrong.

For example, the authors emphasize that getting married is especially unnecessary to living a long life if you are a woman:

"...if you are a single woman with a number of friends and an interesting life, don't think you need to follow the misleading message to get married (or remarried) to improve your health."

For men, divorce seems to matter more: Men who divorce do not live as long as those who stay single or stay married.  Remember, though, that the people in this study were born about a century ago. The implications of divorce may differ over time. A study published in 2009, for instance, points to the possibility that divorce may not matter much at all for people from more recent cohorts.

Here's another example in which the authors could have made an even bolder statement about the problems with the claims about the implications of getting married:

"[Previous] studies have found that married people tend to be happier than unmarried people, but this is usually because people who get married tend to be happier several years before marriage; likewise, people who get divorced tend to be less happy before they are married."

True, but as many Singled Out and Living Single readers already know, there is an even more important reason why comparisons of currently-married people to unmarried people results in bogus conclusions: The people who are currently married do not include all of the people who ever got married. The many people who are divorced, for example, are not included. You can't say that "getting married" results in greater happiness or health or anything else if you only include in the "got married" group a fraction of the people who ever did get married.

Here's one last example of something I would have rewritten a bit. It involves just one word that I would have deleted from these two sentences. I know I don't need to tell Living Single readers which one it is:

"Emma, forever mature and focused, had chosen to remain single. Nevertheless, her life was quite full."  

Here's hoping the spotlight continues to shine on The Longevity Project.

[Thanks to Nicole and M for the tips about relevant stories. I think there were others, too - remind me and I'll add your names.]