Healthy Marriage

At work we now have public TV channels pumped to our PC's. Today I stumbled across a lecture by some lady on the Medical Broadcast Channel who was talking about how been married is healthier for you. I like this concept seeing as though in December I'm getting married. Now this lady had lots of big works and slides and apparently had used a big sample of people and ruled out things like economics, race, local neighbourhood etc to graph how marriage affects your physical, mental and cognitive health (I have no idea how you can really assess, measure and graph the last two, but she had). Over lunch today a friend of mine (who got married earlier this year) said that it has been know for some time that marriage is healthier for you. I must be behined the 8 ball.

Apparently married and widowed women live longer than divorced and never married women, where as men who are married live longer than widowed, divorced and never married men. Also people who do not currently have a spouse may suffer more stress or depression and people who do not have a spouse and have children are more at risk again. The lady said for your overall health it is best to be married and without children.

I have no idea when the talk I heard was given, but this article from this year says:

“Married people are still healthier than unmarried people,” Liu said, “but the gap between the married and never-married is closing, especially for men.”

Looks like I don't have too much to be worried about for my future married life...

While trying to find who the lady I heard was and what year she gave the talk, I found some myths about marriage from the Discovery website. Myth 5 and 9 were interesting about cohabitation before marriage. Just now doing a Google search on the author, he has some stats about cohabitation in America and he even has a marriage website sitting on a New Jersey University server.