Scientists have known that marriage can boost a man's health and augment a women's purse. The new study shows that divorce or losing a spouse to death can exact an immediate and long-lasting toll on those mental and physical gains.Didn't we know this intuitively?
[Make the jump if you want to read the details.]
"That period during the time that this event is taking place is extremely stressful," said study researcher Linda Waite, a sociologist and director of the Center on Aging at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.This is obvious, isn't it?
Finding that divorce and spousal death had similar impacts on a person's health suggests divorce operates like a traumatic event in one's life, according to Waite.I've heard that divorce's impact on children is like a death in the family. Nowhere in this article is the impact on children mentioned. My guess is that wasn't part of the study - especially given the age of the participants.
Waite and Mary Elizabeth Hughes of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland analyzed data collected from nearly 9,000 adults ages 51 to 61 who took part in the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study.That's an interesting age sample. I would be interested in a broader age range.
Overall, about 20 percent of the participants were remarried, meaning they had previously been divorced or widowed, the researchers will report in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. And nearly 22 percent had previously been married but hadn't remarried. Less than 4 percent were never married."Hadn't remarried" and "never married" are broad categories. I would be interested in breakdowns that sorted out shack-up couples, people who had long term relationships but didn't shack up, same-sex couples, and people who didn't have a long term relationship at all. Also, what about break-ups in these cases compared to continuous relationships?
Results showed that those who had been divorced or widowed suffered from 20 percent more chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer, compared with individuals who were currently married.I'm sure reading things like this doesn't help never-married people feel any better!Other findings included:
* People who never married reported 12 percent more mobility limitations, such as trouble walking or climbing stairs, than married individuals.
* People who never married were 13 percent more likely to show signs of depression than their married counterparts.
* Individuals who remarried reported an average of 12 percent more chronic conditions and 19 percent more physical limitations compared with the continuously married. No difference in depression was found between these two groups.Perhaps there is a connection to this and the fact that second (and subsequent marriages) are more likely to end in divorce?
Hayward notes, however, that the results give averages and that some divorces may do a body good.Definitely - if a marriage does not consist of two people who are cut out for marriage, including that they generally want to be married, it is going to be stressful. If one or both spouses is abusive, then it is best to get out. But it would have been even better to have never gotten into that situation to begin with. My advocacy of marriage does not include a belief that all individuals should marry."If you have a high-conflict, abusive marriage, divorce can be a relief," he said during a telephone interview. "I would never recommend that people in high-conflict, abusive marriages stay in them."
One of the problems with these studies is that we are comparing individuals to each other, not themselves. People go through different phases in their lives as they age, and we have no idea what any particular John Doe, married continuously for 30 years, would be like if he had divorced 10 years ago. He may be better off currently than a Fred Roe with a similar background who did divorce 10 years ago. Finding that John Does, on average, are better off that Fred Roes probably does mean that the divorce was a bad thing, but are we sure the divorce isn't itself a symptom of what is causing the other negative elements?
Ultimately, though, most people who go through divorce will tell you that it was a horrible experience.
Yeah, a lot of the story is in the focus of the science article. I agree that while the findings are supportive of a more stable first-time is the most important time understanding of marriage, the premise of the study only focuses on the adult relationship.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it is like convincing people to not litter by pointing out how it affects surfing conditions. Personal health is more important then surfing, but it is also a very limited and self-serving slice.