Marriage and Health

Marriage is good for the health, but it isn't so beneficial "in sickness," new research finds. Previous studies have consistently found that people who are married report better health than people who aren't. But marriage may not do much to help people who are seriously ill, the study finds. On top of that, married people overestimate how healthy they are.
"The married don’t seem to report their health as being poor until they've already developed much more severe health problems," study researcher Hui Zheng, a sociologist at Ohio State University, said in a statement. "They have a different threshold for what they consider to be bad health compared to unmarried people."

Healthy marriages?

Zheng and his colleagues analyzed data from 789,000 people who took the National Health Interview Survey from 1986 to 2004. The U.S. Census Bureau runs the survey, which has been ongoing since 1957.

One survey question asked respondents to rate their own health as either excellent, very good, good, fair or poor. This self-report has been shown to be a very accurate portrayal of a person's physical health, and in some cases, Zheng said, can be a better predictor as to whether someone will die in the short term than a doctor's diagnosis.

The researchers examined how this self-reported health assessment related to marital status and mortality risk over a three-year period. [6 Scientific Tips for a Successful Marriage]

They found that, in general, married people were less likely to die within three years than people in all other categories, including those who were never married, divorced, widowed or separated. Someone who has never been married who self-rates his or her health as "excellent" is twice as likely to die within three years as a married person in excellent health, for example. (These findings took into account demographics such as age).