We’ve long heard that being married offers one pretty huge advantage (on top of true love, constant companionship, and having someone morally obliged to share their food with you): a longer life expectancy.
But, in news that is bound to make anyone happily single feel very smug indeed, it turns out that being married is no longer linked to living for longer.
New research, published this month in the Social Science Quarterly, has debunked the myth that singletons die earlier, the Metro reports.
Previous studies have suggested that married people have longer lifespans, while singles are more likely to die early, have heart attacks and struggle with depression. Oh great.
However, after analysing data from married couples born between 1955 and 1984, the team from The Ohio State University College of Medicine in the US found that, while coupled-up people from older generations did seem to experience improved health through marriage, this marital advantage seems to be decreasing in younger generations.
They discovered that health benefits were only seen in ‘very long marriages’, and ‘only among women’, but that this ‘effect was ‘completely attenuated’ among women in the youngest age group.
‘The modest benefit of marriage for women’s subjective health has eroded in recent cohorts,’ the study concluded.
The team aren’t sure why this is actually happening. One explanation is that the benefits of marriage were previously overstated. Another possible reason is that women (who were thought to benefit most from marriage in older generations) are now more financially independent, meaning lower stress and a potentially longer lifespan.
Of course, health and life expectancy are based on lots of different factors, but the one thing that we probably can conclude from this study is that there’s absolutely no reason to fear being single!
