The power of marriage to transform allegedly forlorn single people into blissfully happy and healthy couples is not just the stuff of fairy tales. For more than 70 years, social scientists’ studies have supposedly shown that marrying improves people’s wellness. Award-winning scholars and leading magazines have all proclaimed that marriage typically makes people healthier and happier.

The promise is seductive: Find and marry that one special someone and all your dreams will come true.

Recently, though, new and methodologically sophisticated studies have been published that suggest something startling: Maybe we are wrong about the benefits of marriage. People who marry, it seems, do not become healthier than when they were single, and may even become a shade less healthy. They do not become lastingly happier, either.

How is that possible?

In sickness and health

In the July issue of "Social Science Quarterly," Dmitry Tumin, a sociologist at the Ohio State University School of Medicine, reported the results of a study of the health implications of first marriages. More than 12,000 Americans described their general health (on a five-point scale ranging from excellent to poor) year after year, both when they were single and after they wed.

Tumin gave marriage every chance to shine. He looked separately at the results for men and women to see if their health improved after they married. He looked at short marriages (no more than four years), medium-length marriages (five to nine years), and enduring marriages (10 years or more). He grouped the married participants into three different birth cohorts: 1955, 1965 and 1975.

No matter how he looked at it, Tumin found marriage did nothing for men’s health. Among the women, only the oldest study participants in the most enduring marriages described their health as a bit better after they had married.