By Rick Mitchell, M.D., M.S.
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” – 1 Peter 4:8
My apologies to the romantics out there – if I had been paying closer attention I would have written this article BEFORE Valentine’s Day. Writing it on Valentine’s Day is the best I can do, but I feel inspired. After all, after a day of gazing adoringly into my wife’s eyes, I’m in the mood to share some thoughts about love!
This topic may sound surprising – after all, this is a health column, not “Dear Abby.” But it turns out that loving relationships may actually have an impact on health, so I’m here to tell you about it. For those not currently in a romantic relationship, I apologize if it seems like I’m leaving you out. While I don’t address it directly, most of the health benefits I mention below can also be provided by someone who loves you unconditionally, like a parent or a sibling (just like the Disney movie Frozen taught us!)
To start, you need to understand the difference between associations and causations. You woke up and the sun rose this morning, but your waking didn’t cause the sun to rise. Those events, linked in time, are an association. The Earth also turned over a 24-hour period and the sun rose again – these two events are also linked in time, but this time the one causes the other.
It’s important to understand this because proving a cause/effect relationship between health and marriage is challenging to do since human interactions are so complicated. So as you look at the rest of this, understand that we can’t usually prove that the health outcomes I’ll mention are caused by marriage. Another possibility is that people who are healthier are more desirable partners, so marriage selects healthy people instead of causing healthy people (which may be partially true, but most researchers feel that the one at least partially causes the other in most cases.)
The information I’m about to share comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from a 2007 publication entitled “The Effects of Marriage on Health: A Synthesis of Recent Research Evidence.” HHS looked at 5 areas of research as noted below.
Health-related behaviors
Here marriage is a bit of a mixed bag. Marriage is associated with a lowering of certain types of unhealthy behavior, such as heavy alcohol and drug use. Tobacco use doesn’t show a clear improvement, but in my practice plenty of people who have quit indicate that a supportive spouse really helped. On the downside, after marriage people tend to gain some weight (an average of 5 pounds per person), and they may also become more sedentary.
Health care access, use, and costs
There are many more positive connections here, and the cause/effect relationship is often more direct. Through a working spouse’s employment, many people get access to health insurance who may not otherwise have had it, or may be able to keep medical insurance after the loss of a job. Marriage is also associated with shorter average hospital stays, fewer doctor visits, and less chance of nursing home admission. It may also be associated with more use of preventive screenings.
Mental health
A number of studies show that people who are married experience fewer depressive symptoms than people who remain single. However, people who go through marital discord which leads to divorce have an increase in depressive symptoms, and those symptoms tend to last in the long term. Depressive symptoms are the only ones that HHS reviewed, but from my experience, anxiety symptoms are likely to be reduced among married people compared to singles.
Physical health and longevity
This one is a bit trickier. Many studies suggest an association between being married and improved physical health (less disease) and longer life, but these studies are the ones that are most likely to ignore the idea that marriage naturally selects healthier people, so this one especially needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Intergenerational health effects
Studies suggest that growing up in a family with married parents is associated with better health and longer life, particularly in men. However, these studies focus on people born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and so it would be difficult to apply them directly to families today.
There it is – being in love may keep you in better overall health. So even though Valentine’s Day will have come and gone by the time you read this, feel free to fawn over your sweetheart a little more. That apple of your eye may be the apple a day that helps keep the doctor away!