A lot of claims on the effect of marriage on men’s health has been thrown around by both pro-marriage and anti-marriage people. People like Stefan Molyneux are known to aggressively advocate for marriage by citing the studies that show health benefits of marriage. On the other hand many mgtows tend to highlight the negative aspects of marriage by citing different studies. I figured I’d take a look on some of the studies and see which way the body of evidence seems to point.

Now I have to state that being a man going his own way, I’m obviously anti-marriage. This does not mean that I have anything against married people or their marriages. On the contrary I hope for the men’s sake that their marriages last and that they are not shred to pieces in the divorce courts. That said I will strongly advice men against getting married simply because marriage is a strongly gynocentric institution in which a man basically loses all of his bargaining power. I don’t think that this is something that can be denied by anyone. But regardless of my anti-marriage stance I will try to look at the health stats as objectively as I can.

Let’s start by looking at the overall mortality. A 2011 meta study analysed the data from about 90 studies and included about 500 million people in total. Most of the data originated from the studies conducted in the last 60 years. The study compared the mortality of never-married people to that of their married counterparts excluding the divorced and widowed. The result for men was that the risk of death was 32 % higher across a lifetime for never-married men compared to married men. The lead author of the study David Roelfs said that “under the worst-case scenario single men could die about 8–17 years earlier than their married male friends”. I have to say that I’m not sure what he meant by that “worst-case scenario” thing. Is the average figure lower than this or what? Anyways the higher risk of death seems to be more strong in the younger years compared to the older years. The relative risk of death for singles (both men and women) aged 30–39 years was 128 % higher than among their married counterparts but only 16 % higher for 70 year olds. To me this seems to make sense if some part of the mortality lowering effects of marriage comes from having a less risky lifestyle. The younger people tend to take more risks than the older ones thus it would make sense that marriage would have the biggest effect on the mortality of younger people. The biggest problem in this meta study seems to be that they excluded divorced people from it. The social psychologist Bella DaPaulo says the following in the same article: “You can’t say that single people would live longer if they got married, based on this research, because the researcher is only counting the people who got married and are still currently married. Divorced and widowed people got married at one time, too,”. So to get a more fair comparison you would have to count the divorced and widowed people among the married cohort. However it seems that if you manage to make your marriage work it will lower your overall mortality significantly compared to never-married men. It should be noted that this is true only on average since the meta-study didn’t to my knowledge control for any other socioeconomical factors apart from the marriage status.

The previous was about overall mortality so let’s proceed to study the effects of marriage on the most common health issues which are cardiovascular, cancer and mental issues. A Japanese study found out that never-married men were 3 times more likely to die from cardiovascular diseases than married men. This is again without controlling for any other factors besides the marriage status. Undoubtedly some part of this difference between never-married and married men comes from the fact that married men tend to have on average healthier livestyles and less risk taking. The Framingham Offspring Study evaluated 3 682 adults over a 10-year period and found that even when the biggest cardiovascular risk factors such as age, body fat, smoking, blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol were controlled for, married men still had 46 % lower rate of death than unmarried men. In this particular study marital happiness didn’t even seem to influence the protective effects of the marriage although some other studies found out that marital stress was linked to hypertension, an important cardiovascular risk factor. Now I find it pretty interesting that such a big difference persisted even after controlling for the major risk factors. Is the reason that mental factors have such a big impact on your cardiovascular death rates? Or do women have some weird skill with which they are able to select those men for marriage that are healthier in the long term? I really don’t know. What’s more even after a heart problem has developed a supportive marriage is still linked with improved survival.

Ok so let’s look at cancer next. The Harvard Medical School article states that there is little evidence that marriage lowers the overall risk of getting cancer. Still marriage seems to influence what happens after you get cancer. A study of about 28 000 cancer cases found out that unmarried people were more likely to have advanced cancer when they were diagnosed. The article doesn’t disclose how big the difference was. Unmarried patients were also less likely to receive treatment than married patients and even when studying those who received cancer therapy, marriage was linked to improved survival rates. The reasons for these findings seem pretty self-evident. Men are known to be often very poor at taking care of their own health. Men tend to go see the physician only when the situation is already pretty serious. Having a nagging wife of course helps with this. This is something that men need to learn to do by themselves.

Marriage also seems to have a positive effect on mental health of men although the article admits that in this regard the data is sparse. Married men have a lower risk of depression and a higher satisfaction with life compared with unmarried men. Again the article doesn’t mention by what margin of difference which makes me doubt the significance of the findings. Also many men still have it in their heads that marriage is something they should do to be “real” men. In this cultural zeitgeist it’s not surprising that those men who are unable to find a wife think that they have failed somehow even if their lives are in order in every other regard. It would be interesting to see a study where they would compare the life satisfaction of married men who always wanted to get married to that of those men who are not married and never even wanted to get married. As the mgtow phenomenon continues to grow there should soon be enough mgtow minded men to form a sufficient sample size for that kind of study.

According to this Harvard medical school article it seems that marriage is definitely something that boosts a man’s health. Should us MGTOW just pack our bags and get married then?

Well maybe not. There’s a ton of research indicating that marriage is actually detrimental to male health. The same Bella DePaulo who I quoted criticising the mortality study earlier has a blog “Living single” in Psychology Today where she talks about the other side of the marriage story. In one of her blog posts she lists 23 ways single people are better off than married people. I’m particularly interested in the reason #4 (the complete list can be found from the link below):

“Always-single men are less likely than men of any other marital status to experience heart disease. Results are from an 8-year study of heart disease in mid-life, based on a representative sample of Americans. The always-single women looked good, too, but the results were particularly striking for the men.”

This clearly contradicts the studies cited earlier in this text. Let’s take a closer look at this finding. It was an 8-year study of heart disease with a representative sample of about 9000 people in late mid-life. The study ran from 1992–2002. When the study started the participants ages ranged from 51 to 60. The participants were surveyed five times during the study, each time their marital status, cardiovascular health status and health behaviours were recorded. The participants were classified by these five marital statuses:

continuously married (ie. on their first and only marriage)

remarried

widowed

divorced

always single

At the start of the study the percentages of men with heart disease went as such:

The group with least heart disease was always single men with 13 %. After that came continuously married with 13.5 %, remarried with 16.4 %, widowed with 16.5 % and divorced men with 17.7 %. As the study went on the authors calculated the probability of experiencing heart disease from 51 through 65 for each marital status group. At the end of the age range at 65 the results were as follows for men:

always single men with 29 %, widowed men with 33 %, remarried men with 42 %, continuously married men with 46 % and divorced men with 50 %.

Please take note that continuously married men had almost the same risk that the divorced man had. I speculate that this is to do with stress. Married men tend to work harder as in many cases they have to provide for their wife and children. The effects of the stress may cumulate during the years and cause health problems later in life. Of course this is just my speculation. The study goes on to try to explain these findings with different health behaviour among the five marital status groups. Based on the data they found the following explanation

“Longer marriages were associated with less healthy behaviors and an accumulation of morbid conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol.”

The differences in results between this study and the one presented earlier might come from the age of the participants. This study focused on older men while the other article didn’t disclose the age range of the participants. As stated earlier the protecting effect of marriage is most likely stronger for younger men. So it seems that the case about marriage health effects is not as clear cut as it might seem in the mainstream media. I also know that there certainly is a marriage bias in the society and that this bias effects how these studies are reported on.

The evidence regarding the health effects of marriage for men seems to be mixed although I do admit that there seems to be more evidence supporting the marriage is beneficial for male health theory. This of course only holds true if you are able to avoid the divorce bomb as divorced men often have poorer health than those men who have always been single not to mention the fact that they often lose a significant part of their net worth and their children in the process. Thus it behoves us to take a brief look at the wonderful world of divorce statistics.

Divorce rate here is defined by the percentage of marriages that end in divorce. This figure is surprisingly difficult to find out. It is commonly estimated that in US 40–50 % of marriages end in divorce. This is based on the fact that in any given year the amount of marriages is about twice the amount of divorces in the same year. A study that ran from 2002–2012 found out that 29 % of first marriages of women aged 15–44 were disrupted (divorce, separation or annulment) within 10 years. According to Wikipedia beyond 10-year window the data is lacking. However in 2002 the National Survey of Family Growth forecast based on data from a 1995 study that within 15 years 43 % of the marriages would be disrupted and 50 % of them would be disrupted within 20 years. So it’s fairly safe to say that the actual divorce rate in US hovers around the 50 %. This means that about 50 % of the men that decide to get married do not get to partake in the health benefits of marriage but end up worse than their peers who decided to stay single.

Let’s look at some of the effects of divorce on male health. In the Whitehall study 18 403 men aged 40–64 were examined between the years 1967–1969. A number of clinical studies were done to these men. Their marital statuses were determined by a questionnaire. The questionnaire also included questions about behavioural risk factors such as smoking and drinking. Mortality data for the group was gathered during 18 years follow up. So here are the age adjusted mortality rates per 1000 person years by marital status.

Married men have the smallest mortality rate of 13.9, single men come next with 16.9 and widowed men with 20.6. The divorced or separated men had the highest mortality rate of 21. So if you are currently a single man and you want to minimize your mortality rate after the age of 40 what should you do? If you get married you have approximately 50 % chance of staying married and getting to enjoy the low 13.9 mortality rate. But you also have about 50 % chance of getting divorced and having your mortality rate rise to 21. The widowed case can be neglected here because that is not a very common thing to happen to men and the widowed mortality rate is so close to that of divorced men anyways. So this means that the expected value for your mortality if you choose to get married is the average of mortality rates for married men (13.9) and for divorced men (21) that is 17.45 (0.5*13.9 + 0.5*21 = 17.45). This is slightly higher than the mortality rate for single men (16.9). So according to this study getting married actually makes your statistical mortality rate higher. This is how big of an effect the risk of divorce has. The biggest difference between the single men and divorced men in mortality rates is because of higher cancer mortality in divorced men. Single men had cancer mortality rate of 4.6 while divorced men had 8.2. This is partly caused by the higher rates of smoking in divorced men but couldn’t be entirely explained away by the consumption of cigarettes. The very same study also had this to say:

“The initial increased mortality for single men was no longer evident after adjustment for other risk factors, suggesting that single status in itself may not increase the risk. The risk for single men may have been underestimated, however, by over adjustment for possible intermediary factors.”

Unsurprisingly divorce is also known to cause mental problems such as depression, anxiety and loss of identity for men. Divorce also ups the suicide rates for men. Divorced men were over 8 times more likely to commit suicide than divorced women. Although some studies state that suicide rate is still higher for single men than divorced men. All in all I think that everyone can agree that divorce is not a very nice fair for men and that by getting married you expose yourself to the risk of being divorced. This risk is a very real one for the man as about 70 % of divorces are initiated by women. To be honest there is a number of things a man can do to lower the risk of ending up divorced. These include choosing a woman who has had none or just a few sexual partners before you, not getting married before the age of 21, getting an education and being religious. These are again statistical findings and might not represent a causational effect. These criteria of course significantly limits the pool of prospective partners and makes finding a future wife more costly both in time and money. I mean try to find a woman over 21 these days with 0 sexual partners.

It’s time to draw some conclusions. It seems clear enough to me that strictly statistically speaking marriage offers some health benefits. The catch is however that about 50 % of marriages at least in the US end in divorce and the health effects of divorce are overwhelmingly negative. So if you take into account the possibility of divorce the positive health effects of being married are cancelled out by the negative health effects of divorce. Of course the possibility of the divorce can be mitigated with some actions and probably the negative health effects of divorce can also be mitigated by some actions such as not drinking and smoking so much as many divorced men tend to do. These facts are often brought up by those that advocate for marriage be they self-interested women who want to get some goodies or conservatively minded men who hold the institution of marriage sacred for whatever reason. Of course they conveniently forget to mention that also most of the health benefits of marriage can also be achieved without actually getting married. This may sound oxymoronic but let me explain what I mean.

Just ask yourself the question why married men seem to be more healthy than their unmarried counterparts. Is this because the ink from the marriage contract seeps through your skin and increases your vitality or something like that? Well of course not. The mere act of getting married of course has nothing to do with anyone’s health. Some of the health benefits probably are a result of the already successful and healthy men being more able to get married than unsuccessful and unhealthy ones. These health benefits if you can even call them that as their not causal cannot be achieved by getting married. You either have them or not. Some of the health benefits in turn are a result of married men having healthier lifestyles and taking less risks. Well those health benefits can be obtained by adopting the healthier lifestyles all on your own. Marriage is not required to gain those health benefits. What’s more if you choose to adopt those healthy lifestyles on your own you can get the health benefits without exposing yourself to the grave risks of divorce. And I’m not just talking about the risks on your health. The financial risks are probably even more harrowing. You can also choose to what extent you want to prioritize your health or some other things in life, a luxury that many married men lack as their wives are practically making the decisions for them. You see health is not the only thing in your life that matters and adopting healthy lifestyles often mean that you have to give up or at least cut back on some of the things you enjoy. But I’m actually of the opinion that yes men should start valuing their own health more. I mean sure drinking, smoking, doing drugs, eating fatty foods and so on is fun but those activities take a huge toll on the latter part of your life if you engage in them too much. Also if you have the possibility just go see that physician regularly even if you don’t have any acute reasons to do so. Especially if the doctor visits are covered by your employer. You would be fool not to take advantage of that privilege.

To sum it up I really see no convincing reasons here to get married just for the statistical health benefits. Of course you can still enjoy the company of women or even be in a long term relationship if that’s what you want. You can even live with a woman. Just make sure that you are not trapped by the common law marriage clauses. Although I’m personally too paranoid to do anything with a woman that leaves an official mark somewhere because the laws can always be changed on the whims of the government. Plus I find that living by myself is so much easier. Making decisions is a snap and I don’t have to be making compromises all the time.

There is one more point that I’d like to make. If you care about men and want to fight against the misandric family courts you definitely should not get married. You cannot effectively oppose something while proudly participating in it. As long as men keep getting married and handing that power to women, there’s never an incentive to change the system. If you think that promoting your cause enough and making lots of coherent arguments on your blogs is gonna make the women see the injustice, I’m sorry to say that you are delusional. Women have shown us time and again that they are able to see something as a problem only when it starts to affect them. Only by exposing the women to the consequences of their own actions can you make a change. So if you care about men at all deprive those entitled women from their free ride and give them the incentive to get up and start changing the system.

Sources:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44122528/ns/health-behavior/t/single-people-may-die-younger-new-study-finds/

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/marriage-and-mens-health

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201405/23-ways-single-people-are-better-the-scientific-evidence

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/200902/single-men-have-good-hearts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/d.htm#divorce

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1059766/pdf/jepicomh00204-0042.pdf

http://jech.bmj.com/content/57/12/993.full

http://socialpathology.blogspot.fi/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html