Being Single - Advantage or Health Risk?

“A happy marriage lowers blood pressure.”   I read this headline as I sat in a warm sunny corner of the spa where I was staying at for a weekend to escape the windy, cold and snowy weather that had descended for the Easter weekend.

The study, being reported by David Gardner in the Daily Mail (28 March 2008), shared the results of a study that compared the blood pressure of 204 married and 99 single adults at random intervals throughout the day and night.  The conclusion of the study, as reported by Gardner, suggested that happily-married couples are more likely to live longer and be healthier and fitter than those who are single. 

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what the solution being offered might be if you want to be healthy, fit and live longer – get married! 

 Something didn’t seem quite right to me as I re-read the headline. "Happily married have lower blood pressure than singles." The headline suggested that only those married people who were happily married were compared to all singles (regardless of their happiness or anything else), the married people seem healthier.  I decided to check out this study in a more depth and what I found out was:

Firstly the adults in the study were from the Provo, Utah community (mostly white). The married group was comprised of 204 heterosexuals. The 99 singles included 12 who were divorced and 1 who was widowed; the others had always been single.

Secondly, when blood pressure was averaged across the 24 hours, there were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure between the married people and the single people.

Thirdly, when blood pressure was looked at, while participants were awake, there were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure between the married people and singles.

The only real key finding in this study was when the authors looked at blood pressure when the participants were sleeping and compared them to when participants were awake. The married people had a greater reduction in blood pressure (not necessarily the same as a lower level of blood pressure), by about 3 points, than single people.

Even then, you cannot say that the married group had lower blood pressure BECAUSE they were married – and here’s why:

One of the first things I learned when taking Research Methods for my psychology degrees was that one cannot deduce a simple cause and effect from the results of a study – all ‘variables’ need to be controlled for.   In this case, for example, if married people differ from single people in blood pressure (or anything else), you cannot know, on the basis of this sort of study, whether they differ BECAUSE they are married or because of other ‘variables.’  Could it be that people who got married already had lower blood pressure and were happy even before they married, and that getting married, therefore, made no difference?

A longitudinal study of happiness, published in The Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (84 (3) p 527-539) in 2003, has been following people for about 18 years.  The authors, Richard Lucas and colleagues, found that people who got married and stayed married throughout the course of the study did experience a small increase in happiness around the time of the wedding but that they then went back to being as happy or as unhappy as they were when they were single.  In other words, if they were happy before they got married, their levels of happiness increased slightly at marriage but then went back to their ‘original’ happiness level.  Likewise, if they were unhappy before marriage, their levels of happiness increased at marriage but then went back to their ‘original’ levels of happiness or unhappiness. These finding would suggest then that happy marriages are a product of happy singles coming together.

Taking this study into consideration, let’s go back to the blood pressure study.  To show that married couples do, in fact, live longer, are healthier and fitter than singles,  would require a study where changes in blood pressure and happiness levels of participants were monitored, while people were single and then when they transitioned from being single to being married.  

Time and time again, the results that make it into the media are a biased version of the actual results of the research, and in just about every instance, they are biased toward making married people look better and single people look worse. 

The worrying thing is that when singles are stigmatized, there is a risk that some people will be tempted to come together and marry for the wrong reasons - to escape the cultural stigma that can still come with being single, to feel ‘whole’, to subscribe to cultural ‘norms’ and to give in to the false belief that their answer to their happiness lies in an institution called marriage rather than within themselves.