Men’s Health Boost from Marriage Disappearing
Time was that the persistently single male was seen as an unhealthy lump, prone to nightly feastings on pizza and beer - probably destined for an early grave because of his unhealthy lifestyle and poor social integration. Marriage or cohabitation, though, would soon give this slob an ordered life with plentiful social and psychological support and therefore a longer lifespan.
Or so the story goes.
New research by Hui Liu and Debra Umberson published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, suggests this story may be changing. Liu and Umberson looked at self-reported health data obtained as part of a huge US survey from over 1 million participants. They were interested in seeing how the relationship between marital status and health had changed between 1972 and 2003.
What they found was that the health gap between married men and men who had never been married narrowed in this 30-year period. By 2003 there was very little difference in health status between unmarried and married men. It seems that marriage no longer confers the same health benefits on men that it once did.
Women and cohabiters
For women no such narrowing in the health gap was seen, mainly because there was little gap to narrow in the first place. In 1972 unmarried women were only slightly less healthy, on average, than married women. In health terms, in 1972, it was only men who were the major beneficiaries of marriage, but this difference is now substantially reduced.
Cohabiters were excluded from the main study, but Liu and Umberson do find that in health terms cohabiting is much the same as being married. Data wasn't collected for cohabiters before 1997 so it wasn't possible to make any comparisons over time about men and women.
Reduced stigma of singledom?
Liu and Umberson offer a partial economic explanation for these changes with the dataset they were using. They find that in the 31 years of the study there had been a relative decline in family income for whites (but not for African Americans) in US. This ties in with the modern idea that the economic benefits of marriage are now much less pronounced than they once were.
Of course economics can't fully explain the change. Liu and Umberson suggest that single men are now able to obtain emotional and social support outside marriage, support that presumably wasn't available in 1972. Perhaps also being a single man is now more socially acceptable, less of an aberration or a sign of implicit deviance to society's core values. As a result single men may see themselves in a more positive light, which is reflected in better health.
That explanation, though, suggests being a single women was more socially acceptable than being a single man in 1972, and I'm not so sure that's true. What do you think about this or other explanations?
[Image credit: striatic]
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Could it perhaps be that fewer wives were working in the 70s and therefore spending more time focusing on healthy meal preparation and taking care of stressful matters in the home? I know that when I work I am more likely to allow my husband the "pizza and beer" for dinner because I am tired. As a single woman, however, I always took the time to make a healthy meal for myself after work--for some reason eating junk food wasn't an option. When someone (traditionally the wife) is at home to take care of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, finances, errands, and child care it relieves much stress from the other spouse (traditionally the man). Certainly this is not the only explanation, but it may be part of the reason men are seeing less benefit from marriage. I would be interested in examining the reasons women seem to be just as healthy as single women as they do in marriage. Are they more motivated to stay fit and healthy?
That was exactly my thought Heather, but that was under the presumption that the gap was moving back to the 'unhealthy' end of the single man in the 1970's. However, I just checked out the abstract (not interested in purchasing the article) and Liu & Umberson actually found "the self-rated health of the never-married has improved over the past three decades". So it appears that the narrowing of the gap is actually moving to the 'healthier' end.
So maybe now that the wives are not at home cooking the healthy meals, the males are stepping up to the plate (so to speak :)
(No offence guys), but it is a self rated assessment/ questionnaire, and I'm sure there are many who would like to pass themselves on as being healthier than what they are. So I would probaly be exploring the validity of the data :)
I mean ... if you hate men you can just say it ...
=*(
I can't find the article now, but I read something a while back about a study of overweight individuals.
Apparently some whopping percentage of people questioned, who were actually medically overweight or obese, classified themselves as being only slightly overweight, or even fit and healthy.
Perhaps our new culture of loving yourself in the shape you're in, has made these men answer more positively than they did in the 70s.