By Sarah Kuta
If you’ve taken the plunge, you’ve likely heard some variation of the popular marriage expression: “Happy spouse, peaceful house.”
But new research from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that the phrase doesn’t go far enough and that the quality of your marriage may be linked to how long you live.
A trio of CU Boulder researchers in the psychology and neuroscience department recently set out to explore the connection between marriage quality and mortality. The findings of their study were published in the journal Health Psychology in November.
Past research has found a connection between the quality of our marriages and our physical health. Other studies have measured the link between marital satisfaction and mortality in people with preexisting conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and renal disease.
But Whisman, who also serves as the department’s associate chair for undergraduate education and director of undergraduate studies, wanted to understand whether a connection exists between relationship quality and death by any means, a ‘downstream’ health outcome, in a sample of the general, healthy population.
To do that, Whisman and graduate students Anna Gilmour and Julia Salinger analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a national survey of American households led by the University of Chicago. They focused their attention on data gathered from more than 19,000 married individuals between 1978 and 2010.
We found that the odds of dying for married people who described their marriage as ‘not too happy’ was 25% greater than the odds of dying for people who rated their marriage as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy.”
Even after factoring in participants’ household income and self-rated health, the results showed a connection between marriage quality and mortality rates — those who were in happier marriages had lower odds of dying than those in not-so-happy marriages.
In their paper, Whisman, Gilmour and Salinger called for additional research to build upon their findings and pointed out that their study has limitations. For starters, participants were only asked one question about the quality of their marriages at one point in time, meaning the researchers didn’t get a very detailed look inside their relationships, nor could they consider changes over time.
There was also no accounting of people who separated or divorced after participating in the survey, nor any measure of other relationship characteristics, such as the length of the marriage or whether the participants had been married before.
Futures studies might also consider the specific biological pathways underlying the connection between marriage quality and mortality, Salinger said. In other words, what’s happening in the bodies and minds of people in both happy and unhappy marriages that could be connected to their life expectancy?
Future research that replicates and extends these findings could have important public health implications — doctors may be inclined to prescribe couples counseling to help lengthen their patients’ lives, for example. Until then, the researchers say their findings are an interesting addition to the growing body of research into how our romantic partnerships affect our health and wellbeing.