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21 August 2006
Hitched And Healthy?
by Serena Mackesy
The media has been abuzz over last week's marriage and health survey. "Marriage is good for you: It's official!" presumably to be followed up with "Spinsters all bonkers, says study!" So much for the permissive society. According to findings presented at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting this week, the best way to be, if you want better mental health, is happily settled with a spouse who loves you. Sooo, people are less psychologically distressed when they live within a stable, supportive, loving framework? Well, duh!
This latest study gives oxygen to conservative traditionalists who favor the two adults (one of each type), two-point-whatever kids, one pet, home-in-the-burbs ideal that is the embodiment of the American dream. It overturns, say the conservatives, the original marriage/health survey, done in the 1970s, on which a lot of the societal liberalizations we now enjoy were predicated. This thirty year-old survey showed that, in terms of shortest to longest longevity, the results were: divorced men, divorced women, unmarried men, married women, married men and unmarried women. In the feminist 70s we interpreted this to mean that marriage, while beneficial for men, wasn't actually a state that suited women all that well.
But now the backlash is upon us. Oh dear, woe is me, the old survey was wrong. And that's the problem with surveys, isn't it? We always interpret them as superseding any information we've gathered before. And that, too, is the problem with statistics. Any set of numbers can be employed to bolster an awful lot of viewpoints. Take fat stats, for instance. Let's say 70 percent (I'm plucking this number out of the air, by the way) of obese people are unhappy. Are they unhappy because they're obese or obese because they're unhappy? Well, that depends entirely on whether you're a psychotherapist or a personal trainer, doesn't it?
Anyway, back to marriage and health. What these two surveys actually represent more than anything else, surely, are the huge changes society has undergone over the past 70 years. One-in-five of us, for instance, is now expected never to marry during our lifetimes, and the divorce rate hovers somewhere between 35 and 50 percent, depending on the country you live in.
Measuring longevity in the 1970s, there would have been little point in studying people who had attained marital age before, say, the 1950s, as the death rate would have been vanishingly minimal. And in the 1950s, marriage was very much the norm. Which means that every type of person got married. Even those who were patently unsuited to the state.
Back in those days, divorce and unmarriedness carried a level of stigma which increased stress levels considerably. And that stigma still lingers today. A friend of mine recently returned almost apoplectic from a carpet shop where she'd spent an entire afternoon having people tell her that her husband would be able to measure up the room/would surely like a say in her choice of carpet etc. Imagine if that was your experience day-in, day-out, for the whole of your life. The only mystery to me is why bygone spinsters didn't all drink themselves to death in droves. But they couldn't, of course, because they weren't allowed in bars.
Nowadays, we have rather more choice in the matter. Singledom is no longer a sign of failure or of obdurate eccentricity. We have two clear groups: single parents and the more or less mentally fragile, who, I would guess, who are producing this clear statistical change in favor of the marital state.
The fact is, in the 1970s, single parenthood was still a pretty rare phenomenon, and single parenthood, however good you are at it, really, really takes it out of you, both physically and mentally. Traditional spinsterhood was an absolute breeze, in comparison to the single-parent (and let's face it, we're still largely talking single-mother) environment as it is today. People living with partners, giving each other financial, physical and emotional support, are bound to weather parenthood better than people coping alone. Similarly, it's hardly surprising that divorcees were all pegging it so early in the earlier survey. Divorce is still hell now, of course, but in an era when every divorcee felt themselves to be the only divorcee, when people dropped their acquaintances when their spouses dropped them, it was a recipe for an early death.
The shattered hopes and tough times the current divorce statistics represent are obviously disastrous in themselves, and the new survey, which seems to concentrate only on the effects of a successful marriage on human wellbeing, fails to address the effects of marrying disastrously versus never marrying at all. But the poignant thing about the new study is this: it was actually a study of the positive effect of marriage on those prone to depression. It showed fairly unequivocally that people who had shown depressive symptoms showed a very marked decrease in the frequency and severity of their symptoms after their first marriage (though it should be noted that their undepressed spouses did not benefit in the same way, many of them possibly being better off if they had stayed single). "Depressed people may be just especially in need of the intimacy, the emotional closeness and the social support that marriage can provide," mused Kristi Williams, one of the study's authors.
The ironic thing about this is that the depressed, with their fears, distancing and general pessimism, are one of the groups least likely to achieve this positive therapeutic state - which requires, after all, a good deal of trust and courage to enter - for themselves. What this suggests, really, is that, now that marriage is an elective rather than an assumed life stage, the sort of people who enter the healthy marital state are the sort of people who are more likely to be healthy in the first place. Makes you think, doesn't it?
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