Debunking Myths about Marriage: It Works for Women, Too.
By HARA ESTROFF MARANO
There is a brand new recipe for a healthy life. The basic ingredients are a low-fat diet, regular exercise -- and marriage.
Countering
conventional wisdom that marriage is bad for women but good for men, a
University of Chicago researcher says she has found that marriage
brings considerable benefits to both women and men. It lengthens life,
substantially boosts physical and emotional health and raises income
over that of single or divorced people or those who live together, she
says.
The researcher, Dr. Linda J. Waite,
a professor of sociology, presented her findings in July at the second
annual Smart Marriages Conference in Washington.
"This is
definitely a public health issue," Dr. Waite said. "People need to know
the facts so they can make good decisions. Marriage is good for
everyone. But I'm battling a deeply entrenched, if dangerous and false,
belief."
The notion that marriage damages women's emotional
well-being derives from the 1972 publication of "The Future of
Marriage" (Yale University Press) by the sociologist Jessie S. Bernard,
who died in 1996 at the age of 93. In it, she reported that married men
are better off than single men on four measures of psychological
distress: depression, neurotic symptoms, phobic tendency and passivity.
But married women, she said, score higher on these negative traits than
single women.
Although the findings were never replicated and
were disputed even then, they entered the lore of the field and of
popular culture. "They helped de-romanticize marriage" at a time when
that was needed, said Dr. William J. Doherty, a professor of psychology
at the University of Minnesota.
"They matched the then-evolving belief that marriage is an oppressive institution for women."
Since
the 1970's, researchers have come up with better measures of emotional
health, and on these, married women and men generally score very well.
Further, in the last two years several large studies that tracked
people in and out of relationships over a long period have produced
evidence that marriage actually causes psychological well-being in both
sexes.
By contrast, Dr. Bernard's material consisted of
one-time glimpses of people's lives. While both Dr. Bernard and Dr.
Waite based their conclusions on data from many studies, reducing the
likelihood that either was reporting a fluke, marriage itself has
changed in the intervening years in ways that generally make women
happier.
Dr. Waite told the conference that her curiosity was
aroused four years ago when she stumbled across "the marriage mortality
benefit" -- statistics showing that married men and women live longer.
In
a large national sample of adults followed for 18 years beginning at
the age of 48, slightly more than 60 percent of divorced and
never-married women made it to 65, as opposed to nearly 90 percent of
married women. Widowed women, for reasons not entirely clear, fared
almost as well as married women. Among men, however, those unmarried
for any reason -- whether widowed, divorced or never married -- had
only a 60 to 70 percent chance of living to 65, versus 90 percent for
married men.
Since then, Dr. Waite has found that "marriage changes
people's behavior in ways that make them better off." Married partners
monitor each other's health, for example. They also drink less alcohol
and use less marijuana and cocaine.
From
detailed reports on 50,000 men and women followed from their senior
year in high school to the age of 32 by University of Michigan
researchers, Dr. Waite discerned a steep increase in "bad behaviors"
among those who stayed single, but a "precipitous drop" in bad
behaviors like the use of alcohol or illegal drugs among those who
married.
Drawing heavily on a study of 13,000 adults assessed
in 1987 and 1988 and again in 1992 and 1993, Dr. Waite demonstrated the
positive impact that marriage has on mental health. The study,
conducted by two psychologists at the University of Wisconsin, Nadine
F. Marks and James D. Lambert, will be published in November in The
Journal of Family Issues.
It is not just that people who
remained married reported significantly higher levels of happiness than
those who remained single. The data showed that those who separated or
divorced over the five-year period became, in Dr. Waite's word,
miserable.
Men and especially women who married for the first
time during the course of the study experienced a sharp increase in
happiness. Remarriage, however, brought only a modest increase in
happiness.
Dr. Waite noted that Dr. Bernard similarly found
married women happier than single women, but relegated that fact to her
book's appendix.
In addition, marriage appeared to reduce the
degree of depression. Men and especially women whose marriages ended
over the five-year period experienced high levels of depression
compared with those who stayed married. Single men as a group were
depressed at the outset of the study and became more depressed if they
stayed single.
Compelling as he found these data, Dr. Doherty,
the University of Minnesota professor, noted that they represent
population-based averages. They do not mean that everyone is better off
married than single, or that people are bound to be happy and healthy
if they marry the wrong person.
Emotional health also hinges on satisfaction with sex,
and in this realm marriage serves both men and women, but delivers a
special bonus to women. First of all, Dr. Waite said, married people
have sex twice as often as single people. Unmarried couples who live
together also have an active sex lives but, like unmarried people, get
less emotional satisfaction from it than married people, the studies
found.
For married men,
satisfaction hinges on sexual frequency, fidelity and emotional
commitment to the relationship. For women, these elements are equally
important, but just the fact of being married added an extra kick to
their sexual satisfaction. "Men make an investment in pleasing their
partner because of their ongoing relationship," Dr. Waite said. "People
who are committed to a partner get more than sex out of sex."
Married
people also have more money. From her own analysis of a National
Institute of Aging survey of 12,000 people 51 to 61 years of age, Dr.
Waite found that married people have more than twice as much money, on
average, as unmarried people. Married couples not only save more while
enjoying some economies of scale, but married men also earn up to 26
percent more than single men.
Similarly, married women earn
more than unmarried women, but only if they have no children. When they
have children, "they trade some time earning for time with their
children," Dr. Waite said. If the women continue to work, she added,
they have difficulty getting child care, and experience stress trying
to balance two sets of demands.
Married women are not only
happier and wealthier than single women, Dr. Waite found, they are also
safer. Moderate domestic violence (defined as as hitting, shoving or
throwing things at a partner) occurred half as often with married
couples and cohabiting couples engaged to marry than it did with
cohabiting couples not planning to marry.
The findings suggest
that there is more to marriage than just a social bond. There appears
to be something specifically protective about the long-term commitment
that marriage entails.
All told, marriage seems to be "an
unmitigated good" for men, Dr. Waite added. For women, marriage indeed
brings increased life satisfaction and happiness, but those benefits
are "part of a package" that also includes family demands that are
sometimes burdensome.
Perhaps, she suggested, this was what Jessie Bernard really meant.
