For long-term health and happiness, marriage still matters

https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-long-term-health-and-happiness-marriage-still-matters-86114ced

by lxm • 3 years ago

113 150 3 years ago

Do relationships matter? Yes, of course. We're social beings.

That said, and not to get off topic, my theory is we'll eventual discover that there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. For much the same reason studies say people with pets live longer. Yes, there's the emotional companionship (that impacts the physical) but there is also the exposure to another's bacteria.

Again, just a theory. But the more I read about "the gut" the more important and influential it's becoming.

*based on readings, often here on HN, I'm not a medical professional

GalenErso• 3 years ago

Yeah. We increasingly want to believe that there exists a viable substitute for everything, that we can have it all.

For example, there are clear health benefits associated with long term relationships and marriage. Some antisocial people would like to believe that that doesn't matter because they can replicate these benefits if only they eat clean, exercise, abstain from alcohol, etc. Well, turns out, there are health benefits to LTRs that cannot be replicated otherwise. Your theory is one possibility. But simply eating clean, working out, getting a lot of sleep, drinking water, and having clean bills of health and good blood tests isn't enough. You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. You won't have the discipline to maintain this lifestyle until the end of your life.

But you can't enjoy the benefits of singlehood and the benefits of LTRs at the same time. This is controversial. But you can't have it all. You can't optimize your life for everything at the same time. We're disgusted at the idea that we may have to pay a cost or sacrifice something. In this case, sacrificing the freedom of choice and the flexibility that comes with singlehood for the health benefits of LTRs. But no. We want the freedom of choice, the flexibility, and the benefits of LTRs.

Similarly, you can't become rich quickly without taking an incredible amount of risk that will in all probability leave you worse off. Other than luck, the true and tried path to long term wealth is to grind for decades at a job or a profession that brings money. Being a doctor, or a FAANG SWE, or starting a business. This all takes hard work and patience. But some people would rather try their hand at get rich quick schemes with cryptocurrency, options trading, or other scams. Very few succeed. That's luck. Most fail.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

You will still die earlier than someone who's not single.

This assumes the reason people in LTR's live longer is because of LTR's, and not that healthier or more fit people are more likely to score LTR's. IME people settle once they think a relationship is locked in and let themselves go.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

You've convinced me. Where do I purchase a wife? If she speaks English, that would be a plus.

testfoobar• 3 years ago

there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles.

Fascinating hypothesis. I wouldn't be surprised that shared diet, living space and activity leads to a converging of gut bacteria. But how would this lead to health and happiness?

chiefalchemist5• 3 years ago

Studies are ahowing gut bacteria has many health implicimplications, tho exact details are still being determined. They also finding a gut to brain connection.

I believe they say, we have more bacteria than cells. Makes me wonder who is hosting who. The point is, those bacteria matter.

hombre_fatal• 3 years ago

A cursory google search suggests that cohabitating couples converge on the same gut biome among various other things like good habits but also bad habits.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458105/

The paper also points out that because of all the concordances, couples tend to share the same downfalls, not just the good things: disease risks, bad diet, bad sleep, emotional turmoil.

Seems to defeat your theory.

throwaway8127• 3 years ago

This article is about women, but I believe the same relationship is seen (perhaps even more strongly) in men.

My cynical view is that healthier people are more likely to attract spouses - in other words, that causality runs in the other direction than the commentaries usually imply.

_gmax02• 3 years ago

Earlier this year I was curious if I could live life as a single male for the rest of my life in a capitalistic Western society that tends to frame many issues from a partisan-listic perspective.

I'm no sociologist and did not apply any critical analysis to these works, but most of the literature and surveys I found on this topic suggested that men fare worse than women on health outcomes when it comes to marital/romantic singlehood. The speculative cause was that these women possessed deeper friendships than those men, who tended to be more isolated, especially in later stages of life.

lockhouse• 3 years ago

I think that’s a pretty honest assessment. Data point of one, but my friendships are not nearly as close or deep as those of my wife’s.

Additionally, if I got divorced, I’m pretty sure I won’t marry again and the only close relationships I am likely to have later in life are with my children and possibly grandchildren (if they bless me with any).

ip263• 3 years ago

Wives also stereotypically are the ones making their partner go see a doctor about that shooting pain in their chest instead of ignoring it.

prawn2• 3 years ago

A married men attains the benefits of a wife promoting a social calendar with her (at least in my case) more numerous friends. This might also be true for anyone in a relationship at all - having a broader circle of friends, and thus social life.

guiambros• 3 years ago

The article touches on both points you make:

"Our study’s sample population—mostly white and relatively well-off professional women deciding about marriage in the early 1990s—does limit the conclusions we can draw from it with confidence. For instance, our all-female sample cannot tell us anything about the effects of marriage on men. More rigorous work in this area is needed, since prior research indicates that marriage promotes men’s longevity and health even more strongly than women’s."

xyzzy4747• 3 years ago

I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I have to say, when I was single several years ago, my happiness was maybe a 4-5 on a scale of 1-10. I used to feel lonely all the time. Right now I'm married and expecting our first child, and I'd rate it a 7-8 (depending on my mood). Some of that is from being more financially secure though.

prawn2• 3 years ago

I'd guess that in general, some financial security comes from a stable relationship: a shared living environment, efficiencies of scale with things like shopping/cooking, car ownership potentially, utilities from heating/cooling, common cause on other fronts.

dagw• 3 years ago

Having kids have brought me more happiness and more pain than anything else I have ever done. Using you scale, if I was 5-7 when single and 6-8 when married with no kids, having kids changed it to 2-10.

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/zWIAT

tlogan• 3 years ago

Being alone sucks especially as one ages and faces declining health.

jfowief4• 3 years ago

Given how fast AI is moving, how much longer will this matter?

realjhol5• 3 years ago

Modern society is like a conjurer who whacks your heirloom rolex with a mallet for a trick. When all that remains is a pile of cogs, broken glass and twisted metal, it suddenly dawns on him.... he's forgotten the end of the trick.

Modernity: let's smash everything. What can possibly go wrong?

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

What an amazing analogy.

Loocid• 3 years ago

Is it? It seems incredibly forced to me.

blacksmith_tb3• 3 years ago

It's a nice image, but there's no unsmashing that watch. You can decry the destruction of tradition, but good luck re-instituting it, those traditions developed in a different world, for example the extended families living together (to take care of children and the elderly) broke up as young people moved to where work was (and various institutions took over child- and eldercare, with varying degrees of success). I think it's too easy to say that pre-modern societies were automatically happier, they were more predictable, but certainly had plenty of people who didn't have a great time. The real question for us now is how do we want to go forward, not why can't we go back.

realjhol5• 3 years ago

First we reject this Whig History nonsense that history is an inevitable march forward. It is clear we have gone badly off course. We have chosen a future that is making people desperately unhappy. So we need to re-adopt things that were carelessly cast aside.

1. Women should use union power to demand proper respect from men. No more sex outside of marriage.

2. Make marriage laws much more strict. No more no-fault divorce. Marriage is a life-long commitment that people shouldn't be incentivised to bail out of - especially not with lucrative settlements.

3. Tar and feather feminists and all people perpetuating divisive gender ideology that makes partnership impossible.

4. Normalise full-time motherhood as a profession that the large majority of women will adopt for a time. No more trying to have it all while the children suffer.

5. Extreme penalties for all pornographers. Their product blights our lives and debases our society.

6. Zero income tax for any married woman who has had more than 4 children - a stroke of brilliance from the Hungarians.

There's just a few ideas for ways we could tip the scales in favour of marriage thus making men, women and children's lives far more happy and fulfilled.

numbers_guy3• 3 years ago

For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end:

    Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who are disproportionately likely to be stably married, to preach what they practice—to not only enjoy the benefits of marriage in their private lives but also to advocate for them in public.

This is the problem in today's society. You cannot preach good values, because somebody is going to get offended. It is important that all lifestyles are tolerated. But at the same time as a society it is important to instill good values in the next generation, values that will keep them healthy, happy and productive. And the problem is, those values are going to offend someone for sure.

monero-xmr2• 3 years ago

Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school.

"Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home

"We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases

It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.

nathan_compton6• 3 years ago

Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them.

The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."

threatofrain• 3 years ago

South Bay Area has quite a few prosperous cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga) where the demographics are politically liberal in candidate preference and their public schools are outstanding. Maybe they're not as good as the private schools you're talking about, but the cities in South Bay tend to be brimming with optimism for their young generations.

In one well known city with a strong middle class, one might expect half of the students to be on the fastest math track available and half of the math faculty in the local high school to be Calculus teachers. The surrounding cities are not too much different.

I wonder what makes your city different? Would you mind specifying what region you're talking about?

imajoo• 3 years ago

Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases: Surprisingly from the NYT. https://youtu.be/hNDgcjVGHIw

lapcat15• 3 years ago

Do we really need more preachers?

Eventually, almost everyone figures out for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn't. Moreover, there are plenty of unmarried people who aren't against marriage, who indeed want to get married, but their life circumstances haven't resulted in marriage, for various reasons. They don't need preachers.

ip263• 3 years ago

Keeping universal insight a secret and expecting everyone to figure it out for themselves seems oppressive to me.

Suppose nobody told you how difficult single parenthood is out of consideration for all the single parents, and you therefore decided to adopt. You figure it out two years later. Years have gone by, and dating is now very difficult. Is this somehow progressive!?

numbers_guy3• 3 years ago

Preachers, teachers, what's the difference, besides the connotation you want to attach?

I believe I had good parents, but I still did lots of mistakes, costly mistakes that I wish I did not make. I am determined to teach all I can to my future children, if any, so that they don't have to learn it all by themselves again.

I think it is only sensible that such teachings are spread society wide, for children who have no good parental figures.

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

We need preachers.

Otherwise you are either completely devoid of advice or you only get advised by someone who is selling you something.

EG: if I advocate marriage (and I do!) it's out of some small ounce of altruism. Economically I don't give half a shit about you and your life circumstances, I never met you and you have no impact on me.

But - if I have a chance of sharing something wholeheartedly that has made my life better and I believe will make most people's lives better - I share that out of some pleasure of perhaps helping someone.

That's what preaching is. When someone preaches to me, I may not listen but I appreciate what is driving them.

worrycue2• 3 years ago

Eventually, almost everyone figures out for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn't.

The approach my parents took to my upbringing - or lack thereof.

Today at 42, I feel I have wasted most of my life and have achieved nothing worthwhile.

Frankly, I don’t feel like living anymore. It just doesn’t seem worth it.

rayiner12• 3 years ago

Human beings, especially young people, need social pressure to help them make good decisions. Do you think if you go to dinner and all your friends order a salad instead of the deep dish pizza, that doesn’t make a difference?

The fact is that most people think they’re special, but they’re not. Modern American society gives people this illusion of choice, and they’re paralyzed by it. But for maybe 80% of people, it’s not going to get much better than getting married, having kids, and working to put food on the table. Socializing the next generation of workers is probably the most you’re cut out to do in this world.

nathan_compton6• 3 years ago

I've got kids and I teach them values and no one is offended.

rayiner12• 3 years ago

I come from a south Asian immigrant family in the US. Nearly every single person I know in my extended cohort of immigrants followed the script (because we were socialized to do so): we studied hard in school, pursued financially lucrative majors, eschewed dating at an early age, got married in our 20s, and had kids. My brother is having his first kid at 31–and my dad and I were frankly getting pretty antsy. And for every single one of us that followed the script it paid off, including those whose parents came here without white collar jobs.

And of course none of us talk about that in public because we want to seem illiberal to our educated white American friends. For a long time I reconciled myself to that cognitive dissonance. But my wife is American, from a deep blue state. And it’s been eye opening to watch the aftermath of the 1960s social revolution on Americans outside the economic elite. It seems like everybody’s parents are divorced. They hang around any stable family they can find. Nobody is willing to guide their kids: they’re supposed to “discover themselves” on their own. The parents are too scared to impose values: this is what we expect, this is what constitutes a good life, this is what your purpose and function and role is. It’s a mess. If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country.

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

Thank you for the brave statement. I am an immigrant from the former USSR and have the same exact observations.

Somehow the boomer generation convinced themselves, when young, that youth was wiser than age, and then neither their kids nor grandkids got any guidance.

lapcat15• 3 years ago

If American culture has been this way 200 years ago we would be living in a third world country.

How do you figure? Did third world countries have current American culture before we did (I ask rhetorically)?

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

It's interesting to have it called a script; implying that it is fixed and out of your control. For what it's worth, I was given the same script by my parents and especially the Catholic Church, but it all seemed pretty ridiculous on its face; even to a child it was pretty clear that it was a nice delusion, but we all end up gone and forgotten once the script runs out. I have zero desire to put children through any of it.

AuryGlenz3• 3 years ago

I’m a fairly new father. It was hard fought for my wife and I. Three years of trying, rounds of IUI, I had to be on different medications that entire 3+ that made me feel shitty, and eventually we succeeded with our first round of IVF. We now have an 18 month old daughter, and we just tried with one of our frozen embryos to get her a sister.

I say tried because while my wife got pregnant, we found out a few days ago that it was an anembryonic gestation. My wife passed what embryo there was today.

We aren’t exactly rich and my parents helped with the funds.

But you know what? It’s all been worth it. Hell, I’ve been stressed like crazy because I want to change careers back to using my degree in computer science instead of the photography I’ve been doing and I don’t have the time to get my skills up to snuff because of her…

But my daughter makes me the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. It’s a joy I never had before. I wish I could somehow let my friends that have decided not to have children experience it.

onos2• 3 years ago

I think everyone knows at some level that the cookbook for the success you highlight is correct and works, as south and eastern asians have demonstrated so systematically. Yet, sadly, many groups avoid it… I think often for intentionally self-defeating or other pathological reasons.

kar5pt• 3 years ago

Nobody is anti-marriage. You're just pulling a straw-man out of your ass.

cafard• 3 years ago

Oh? How stably married has the owner of the Wall Street Journal been? As far as I know, the opinion arm of his TV network is all in favor of monogamy, at least in cases where its ideological adversaries aren't practicing it.

jjj123• 3 years ago

There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority.

Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.

snvzz• 3 years ago

A new study shows that for women, getting married is linked to significantly better physical and mental health

For Women, specifically.

This is very important and omitted from the HN headline.

doitLP• 3 years ago

Because that was the cohort studied, not because the opposite is true for men only. As it says in the article previous studies indicate the effects may be even greater for men.

m-watson• 3 years ago

Here is the paper they are talking about https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...

xracy2• 3 years ago

I think there is a lot of societal pressure to get married/be in a relationship. As such, I think it would be pretty hard to claim that the benefits of marriage are separate from the benefits of not fighting societal pressures in your day-to-day. Or if you could prove that, I think it would be an interesting study.

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

That doesn't make sense. As a male new yorker I faced zero societal pressure to do basically anything traditional.

I am happy as a married dude because my life has infinite more meaning and impact when I am being a husband and a father, versus whatever I was up to before.

MiguelX413• 3 years ago

I may not necessarily agree with it either, but it makes perfect sense and your evidence is completely anecdotal.

JoeJonathan2• 3 years ago

Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care? /jk

But really, I’d like to see more attention to how many of these effects are due to the ways in which marriages are legally recognized and respected in ways that other monogamous long term relationships are not.

I’d also like to know why, if LIBERALS HATE MARRIAGE so much, they spent decades fighting for the right to gay marriage?

klysm• 3 years ago

The only part of marriage that bothers me is not about marriage itself, but how it is codified into legislation and being married can have significant financial implications

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

If marriage is a virtuous institution that improves well being of society and brings about the next generation, why shouldn't it be promoted this way?

sangnoir• 3 years ago

Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care?

j/k not needed: being single can be an adversely selected by poor health - or other things that can cause poor health, such as drug addictions and poverty.

ra1231963• 3 years ago

Getting relationship advice from the hacker news crowd is like getting vegetarian recipes from a butcher

xyzelement17• 3 years ago

I don't get your point. We are a diverse crowd.

Personally, I've lived what is pretty close to the highlight of single life (dating on NYC, traveling to 20-30 countries a year, etc) and now am a boring but super happy suburban dad of 2 (and hoping for more) - you don't think someone like me can offer an insight on what works and why?

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 3 years ago

traveling to 20-30 countries a year

No, probably not. Whatever your life circumstances are, they're so ridiculously far outside the norm that almost nothing about your life applies to most people's.

neilv• 3 years ago

Worse than looking for objective treatment of "Conservative values" in a Rupert Murdoch property?

worrycue2• 3 years ago

Who know what kind of people visit this site? (Apart from having an interest in technology - particularly IT.)

Barrin92• 3 years ago

"We also have to be cautious in generalizing across generations. The Gen-Xers in our sample were deciding for or against marriage in a different cultural setting than young adults today. In the past 30 years, for instance, norms against extramarital cohabitation have relaxed considerably."

Given that the study only concerned women during a time period where stigma was even worse than it still is I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this.

Choosing a more conventional lifestyle, regardless of what you as an individual genuinely want often takes so much pressure from you that it's hard to discern whether it is you or others who are happy about your decisions. I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable.

I think there's a difference between "success" as a consequence of reaping social rewards because you do what is expected of you and genuine individual freedom.

jfowief4• 3 years ago

I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable.

Or they feel like failures because they are failures in a biological sense, and they know it deep down due to their biological brain wiring, but they blame their guilt on their parents and society.

Atheros• 3 years ago

I know that middle-brow dismissals are frowned upon but I want to write this anyway: I will never believe these types of studies without either a control group or better measuring of confounding variables. Health & happiness and marriage both have giant confounding variables like meeting a great partner and being a good partner. The authors claim that they accounted for this but I don't see how. The study is here[1].

an unmeasured confounder would need to be associated with both incident marriage and mortality by risk ratios of 2.45 each, above and beyond the measured covariates, to fully explain away the observed association between marriage and mortality.

I may be interpreting that incorrectly and would appreciate corrections but why is it so unreasonable that meeting a great partner and having kids and thus wanting to strive to be healthier happier person would decrease all-cause mortality by a factor of 2.45 over someone who hadn't accomplished those things?

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...

DiscourseFan• 3 years ago

Look I don't think that "hookup culture" is the future, but it is practically speaking impossible to expect women to be full-time employed AND have time to be homemakers. And yet the productivity of our modern economy is based on women's place in the labor market. There are absolutely emotional and psychological benefits of having a committed partner, but how often do marriages end in divorce, how often are people just putting up with each other, and how much sexual frustration and violence on account of it has been generated by socially enforced monogamy? I don't see why we can't aspire to building a better society where women aren't competing tooth and nail for the men who are fighting tooth and nail for the best social status?

A truly free society would not be one that is either polyamorous or monogamous but one where the fulfillment of sexual needs is considered a social necessity just like the fulfillment of any other physical need and is addressed as a social problem. Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.

jfowief4• 3 years ago

Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.

I don't even know what that means. People are forced to have sex and rear children?

For long-term health and happiness, marriage still matters

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