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The Epidemiology of Love
We’ve all heard it before. Being in a stable, committed relationship is good for you. You have more money, someone to lean on and a bigger network of family support. According to a 2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control, married people usually indulge in less bad behavior – like smoking or heavy drinking. All this good, loving mojo means that married couples live longer. Just last summer, a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles published a study that followed 67,000 Americans from 1989 to 1997. They found that never-married men aged 19 to 44 were almost twice as likely to die over the course of the study, compared to similar-aged married men. Overall, being married reduced death in men by 58%. How nice for them.
But love isn’t all candy hearts and happy octogenarians. Love can be seriously harmful to your health, especially when it goes awry.
The stress of marriage is actually killing women. In a February 2006 study of more than 100,000 Europeans, researchers at Magdeburg University in Germany found that being married actually stole 1.7 years from the average woman’s lifespan. Men gained 1.4 years in the matrimonial deal – talk about sucking the life out of someone. Researchers attributed the disparity to the stress of a double life as working lady and homemaker. They also found evidence that lots of sex was detrimental for women’s longevity, but good for men’s due to hormonal differences later in life.
Love affairs can be intensely stressful, and we all know how dreadful stress is for our cardiovascular systems. One study from the Institute of Psychology at Ningbo University in China found that young men were very stressed by their romantic relationships.
Love may even drive us to kill ourselves. In a study of people admitted to the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, India, with pesticide poisonings, 37.5% said that marital friction was the cause for their attempted suicide, while 14.1% said it was love affairs. Unrequited love my be even more dangerous, according to London clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. Heartache, hopelessness and despair can all lead to physical exhaustion and even suicide attempts. They call it “lovesick” for a reason, you know.
Broken hearts can kill people – especially women. The trauma of losing someone can lead to intense emotional stress, the release of truckloads of stress hormones like adrenalin and eventually to heart attack-like symptoms, according to a 2005 study from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This might help explain why widows die at rates three to 13 times as high as married women for every known major cause of death.
Divorce is a real killer, too. According to Herbert Benson, M.D., author of The Relaxation Response, you are 12 times more likely to come down with a major illness in the first year after divorce compared to controls of similar age and lifestyle. In a 2004 study of Brazilians, divorce was the greatest cause of psychological distress – even compared to a death in the family or a lost job.
And finally, marriage makes you fat, which as we all know can kill us. That’s right, scores of studies published in the last 20 years have found that the newly married gain weight, the long-married are fatter and the divorced and widowed get slimmer.
Love might talk a pretty story, but in the end it might just be the death of you.
