Getting married won’t save you from the clutches of illness

Looks like you’re no better off than us sad singles. Apart from, you know, tax and insurance benefits, security, and having found eternal love.

When it comes to health, a new study suggests that marriage no longer gives you much of an advantage.

Previous research has suggested that single people are more likely to die early, experience heart attacks, and struggle with depression than married people. Married people have also been shown to have longer life spans.

That’s all contributed to a lot of single-bashing and singleton panic, with anyone uncoupled despairing, throwing their arms in the air, and muttering something along the lines of ‘so not only am I alone, I’m also going to die soon. Great.’

But a new study suggests that married people might no longer benefit from longer, healthier lives than their single peers.

The research, published in Social Science Quarterly, analysed married people born between 1955 and 1984. Researchers found that, while married couples from older generations saw improved health from marriage, this marital benefit has decreased over time.

The youngest couple didn’t experience any better health than their singleton counterparts, suggesting that the health benefits of marriage have died out over time.

Or, in more science-y terms, ‘the modest benefit of marriage for women’s subjective health has eroded in recent cohorts.’

It’s not clear why, mind you.

Researchers think the claimed benefits of marriage may have previously been over-reported, thanks to a mixture of not-so-great research methods and external factors.

They say that even in previous decades, the marriage benefit was ‘modest’, only helped women, and only happened for women in very long (meaning more than ten years) marriages.

But the study’s suggested disappearance of any health-based marital effect is interesting – and because the data is self-reported, we currently don’t know why it’s happened.

Lead researcher Dmitry Tumin believes that it’s down to a cultural shift, which has undermined ‘the protective effects of marriage’.

Not as many people get married these days, and people tend to be older when they settle down.

Marriage is no longer a requirement for living together or being in a longterm relationship, and women (the ones most affected by the health benefits of marriage) are more able to achieve financial stability on their own, meaning lower stress.

Basically, being a single woman isn’t as terrible as it used to be, while marriage, The Science of Us notes, remains stressful.

Health and lifespan are down to lots of factors – genetics, lifestyle, stress – and it’s reductive to base them entirely in marital status. But what we can take away from this study is that being single doesn’t make you doomed to poor health and misery.

You can be just as happy and healthy single as you can be married. Which you probably already knew, but it’s nice to have a study backing it up