There is an old saying that people who are married, tend to live longer. According to the authors of the Longevity book, this may be truer for men than for women. The book mentions several factors why being married might lead to longer life although they acknowledge that if the marriage is not happy or is filled with stress, this might backfire. The book also mentions that two of the life events which are considered most stressful are death of a spouse and secondly, divorce. If one never gets married then neither of these stressful events will occur in your lift. But does that mean one shouldn’t get married?
The chapter breaks the participants into 4 categories: Remarried (having previously been divorced); Steadily married; divorced; steadily single. The difference in these groups for men vs women is interesting.
- For men (longest longevity to shortest): steady married; remarried; steadily single; divorced.
- For women- steady married; divorced; steadily single; remarried.
Staying married for all your adult life leads to the longest life for both men and women. But while getting remarried is positive for men, it is not necessarily for women. Interesting. Also, they found that the husband’s marital happiness mattered most – for longevity of both men and women.
A few other trends to note are that the Terman participants tended to stay married or divorce more often based on what they experienced growing up. Also, the personality of the child had a lot to do with who stayed married. For instance, conscientious children tended to stay married.
Would all this be true in today’s society? I have the sense that in the time of the Terman study, women were more dominated by their husband. More women stayed home and took care of the children and their happiness was more dependent on how the family was functioning and if the husband wasn’t happy at work or at home, it had a great influence on the family. As the book points out, because this is a long-term study, it is bound to be somewhat outdated by the time the results are analyzed but trends are still worth looking at.
I also thought about whether these results would be consistent today. As we mentioned in lab, I wonder what the results would be like if they had included LGBTQ couples as well. I think it was smart to point out the difference in gender roles in the time of this study, because I think this is what would make a difference in this experiment if it was conducted now.