11 ms·

For long-term health and happiness, marriage still matters

113 points by lxm 4y ago

chiefalchemist 4y ago
Do relationships matter? Yes, of course. We're social beings. That said, and not to get off topic, my theory is we'll eventual discover that there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. For much the same reason studies say people with pets live longer. Yes, there's the emotional companionship (that impacts the physical) but there is also the exposure to another's bacteria. Again, just a theory. But the more I read about "the gut" the more important and influential it's becoming. *based on readings, often here on HN, I'm not a medical professional
- GalenErso 4y ago
  Yeah. We increasingly want to believe that there exists a viable substitute for everything, that we can have it all. For example, there are clear health benefits associated with long term relationships and marriage. Some antisocial people would like to believe that that doesn't matter because they can replicate these benefits if only they eat clean, exercise, abstain from alcohol, etc. Well, turns out, there are health benefits to LTRs that cannot be replicated otherwise. Your theory is one possibility. But simply eating clean, working out, getting a lot of sleep, drinking water, and having clean bills of health and good blood tests isn't enough. You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. You won't have the discipline to maintain this lifestyle until the end of your life. But you can't enjoy the benefits of singlehood and the benefits of LTRs at the same time. This is controversial. But you can't have it all. You can't optimize your life for everything at the same time. We're disgusted at the idea that we may have to pay a cost or sacrifice something. In this case, sacrificing the freedom of choice and the flexibility that comes with singlehood for the health benefits of LTRs. But no. We want the freedom of choice, the flexibility, and the benefits of LTRs. Similarly, you can't become rich quickly without taking an incredible amount of risk that will in all probability leave you worse off. Other than luck, the true and tried path to long term wealth is to grind for decades at a job or a profession that brings money. Being a doctor, or a FAANG SWE, or starting a business. This all takes hard work and patience. But some people would rather try their hand at get rich quick schemes with cryptocurrency, options trading, or other scams. Very few succeed. That's luck. Most fail.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. This assumes the reason people in LTR's live longer is because of LTR's, and not that healthier or more fit people are more likely to score LTR's. IME people settle once they think a relationship is locked in and let themselves go.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Perhaps. But people who give up on relationships also let themselves go as well. On the other hand, when you're a couple, you might be tempted to let yourself go, but at least there's a chance your mate will refuse to go. Since our behavior is driven by environment (a la we observe the norm, and conform) you'll resist temptation and stay healthy. Habits are easier to maintain when you're not alone. This alone might give couples the edge.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    You've convinced me. Where do I purchase a wife? If she speaks English, that would be a plus.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      OpenAI has a model available that speaks several languages, including English.
      - bluefirebrand 4y ago
        Perfect, everyone wants to marry a model, right?
        gnicholas 4y ago
        Perennial submission for the university economics department T-shirt competition: “Economists do it with models”
        4y ago
- testfoobar 4y ago
  > there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. Fascinating hypothesis. I wouldn't be surprised that shared diet, living space and activity leads to a converging of gut bacteria. But how would this lead to health and happiness?
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Studies are ahowing gut bacteria has many health implicimplications, tho exact details are still being determined. They also finding a gut to brain connection. I believe they say, we have more bacteria than cells. Makes me wonder who is hosting who. The point is, those bacteria matter.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  A cursory google search suggests that cohabitating couples converge on the same gut biome among various other things like good habits but also bad habits. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458105/ The paper also points out that because of all the concordances, couples tend to share the same downfalls, not just the good things: disease risks, bad diet, bad sleep, emotional turmoil. Seems to defeat your theory.
throwaway8127 4y ago
This article is about women, but I believe the same relationship is seen (perhaps even more strongly) in men. My cynical view is that healthier people are more likely to attract spouses - in other words, that causality runs in the other direction than the commentaries usually imply.
- _gmax0 4y ago
  Earlier this year I was curious if I could live life as a single male for the rest of my life in a capitalistic Western society that tends to frame many issues from a partisan-listic perspective. I'm no sociologist and did not apply any critical analysis to these works, but most of the literature and surveys I found on this topic suggested that men fare worse than women on health outcomes when it comes to marital/romantic singlehood. The speculative cause was that these women possessed deeper friendships than those men, who tended to be more isolated, especially in later stages of life.
  - lockhouse 4y ago
    I think that’s a pretty honest assessment. Data point of one, but my friendships are not nearly as close or deep as those of my wife’s. Additionally, if I got divorced, I’m pretty sure I won’t marry again and the only close relationships I am likely to have later in life are with my children and possibly grandchildren (if they bless me with any).
  - ip26 4y ago
    Wives also stereotypically are the ones making their partner go see a doctor about that shooting pain in their chest instead of ignoring it.
  - prawn 4y ago
    A married men attains the benefits of a wife promoting a social calendar with her (at least in my case) more numerous friends. This might also be true for anyone in a relationship at all - having a broader circle of friends, and thus social life.
xyzzy4747 4y ago
I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I have to say, when I was single several years ago, my happiness was maybe a 4-5 on a scale of 1-10. I used to feel lonely all the time. Right now I'm married and expecting our first child, and I'd rate it a 7-8 (depending on my mood). Some of that is from being more financially secure though.
- prawn 4y ago
  I'd guess that in general, some financial security comes from a stable relationship: a shared living environment, efficiencies of scale with things like shopping/cooking, car ownership potentially, utilities from heating/cooling, common cause on other fronts.
- dagw 4y ago
  Having kids have brought me more happiness and more pain than anything else I have ever done. Using you scale, if I was 5-7 when single and 6-8 when married with no kids, having kids changed it to 2-10.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/zWIAT https://archive.ph/zWIAT
smitty1e 4y ago
[flagged]
tlogan 4y ago
Being alone sucks especially as one ages and faces declining health.
- jfowief 4y ago
  Given how fast AI is moving, how much longer will this matter?
realjhol 4y ago
Modern society is like a conjurer who whacks your heirloom rolex with a mallet for a trick. When all that remains is a pile of cogs, broken glass and twisted metal, it suddenly dawns on him.... he's forgotten the end of the trick. Modernity: let's smash everything. What can possibly go wrong?
- xyzelement 4y ago
  What an amazing analogy.
  - Loocid 4y ago
    Is it? It seems incredibly forced to me.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      HN thinks anything they agree with is profound even if it’s just bullshit wrapped up in a little paragraph.
    - brunellus 4y ago
      Tolstoy phrased it more beautifully “If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.”
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        Thank you! This made me find the source of the quote and the wiki page on that - very in line with how my own view is evolving.
    - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
      It’s literally a variant of Chesterton’s fence, so it doesn’t seem forced to me.
- 4y ago
numbers_guy 4y ago
For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end: Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who are disproportionately likely to be stably married, to preach what they practice—to not only enjoy the benefits of marriage in their private lives but also to advocate for them in public. This is the problem in today's society. You cannot preach good values, because somebody is going to get offended. It is important that all lifestyles are tolerated. But at the same time as a society it is important to instill good values in the next generation, values that will keep them healthy, happy and productive. And the problem is, those values are going to offend someone for sure.
- jjj123 4y ago
  There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority. Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school. "Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home "We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.
  - nathan_compton 4y ago
    Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them. The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
snvzz 4y ago
>A new study shows that for women, getting married is linked to significantly better physical and mental health For Women, specifically. This is very important and omitted from the HN headline.
- doitLP 4y ago
  Because that was the cohort studied, not because the opposite is true for men only. As it says in the article previous studies indicate the effects may be even greater for men.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
m-watson 4y ago
Here is the paper they are talking about https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113323000020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...
xracy 4y ago
I think there is a lot of societal pressure to get married/be in a relationship. As such, I think it would be pretty hard to claim that the benefits of marriage are separate from the benefits of not fighting societal pressures in your day-to-day. Or if you could prove that, I think it would be an interesting study.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  That doesn't make sense. As a male new yorker I faced zero societal pressure to do basically anything traditional. I am happy as a married dude because my life has infinite more meaning and impact when I am being a husband and a father, versus whatever I was up to before.
  - MiguelX413 4y ago
    I may not necessarily agree with it either, but it makes perfect sense and your evidence is completely anecdotal.
    - xracy 4y ago
      I would argue his evidence isn't even evidence against my point. Since he probably doesn't realize the societal pressures that got him into being married. :) But it's also definitely anecdotal. My counter-evidence is somewhat anecdotally motivated, but I've definitely lived in all kinds of places where there's strong societal incentives to get married (for one thing, at a baseline, taxes).
JoeJonathan 4y ago
Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care? /jk But really, I’d like to see more attention to how many of these effects are due to the ways in which marriages are legally recognized and respected in ways that other monogamous long term relationships are not. I’d also like to know why, if LIBERALS HATE MARRIAGE so much, they spent decades fighting for the right to gay marriage?
- klysm 4y ago
  The only part of marriage that bothers me is not about marriage itself, but how it is codified into legislation and being married can have significant financial implications
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    If marriage is a virtuous institution that improves well being of society and brings about the next generation, why shouldn't it be promoted this way?
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      1 - Does such direct promotion actually work? My vague impression is "poorly, at best". 2 - How much overhead cost (especially legal & bureaucratic) does the promotion create? Note that politicians getting to congratulate themselves on being yet more pro-marriage is not a benefit for society.
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        It at the very least sends a message about what our society values. Something I noticed is at least nominally rewarded by the tax code: be married, have kids, buy a house, save energy, give charity. All the right messages.
        loeg 4y ago
        Prior to like, 2017, the tax code used to impose a significant marriage penalty on couples with similar incomes; now it only imposes some smaller penalties. It is extremely recent that the tax code wasn't an active disincentive to get married for many couples. Being married is mostly not rewarded, unless one partner is a homemaker. (Home ownership, parenting, and charity are rewarded by the tax code in a way that is unrelated to marriage.) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marriage-penalty.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marriage-penalty.asp
ra1231963 4y ago
Getting relationship advice from the hacker news crowd is like getting vegetarian recipes from a butcher
- xyzelement 4y ago
  I don't get your point. We are a diverse crowd. Personally, I've lived what is pretty close to the highlight of single life (dating on NYC, traveling to 20-30 countries a year, etc) and now am a boring but super happy suburban dad of 2 (and hoping for more) - you don't think someone like me can offer an insight on what works and why?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    > traveling to 20-30 countries a year No, probably not. Whatever your life circumstances are, they're so ridiculously far outside the norm that almost nothing about your life applies to most people's.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      I am making an extreme point. Whatever people's idealized single life is, working in finance/tech in NYC, dating and traveling would be on that list. And I can still articulate why married life is way better for me.
      - throwawytroll6 4y ago
        [unnecessarily toxic]
        xyzelement 4y ago
        I am referring to the opportunity cost. I had the most "fun" to give up.
      - _gmax0 4y ago
        'Whatever people's idealized single life is, working in finance/tech in NYC, dating and traveling would be on that list.' This is where you begin to overgeneralize.
Barrin92 4y ago
"We also have to be cautious in generalizing across generations. The Gen-Xers in our sample were deciding for or against marriage in a different cultural setting than young adults today. In the past 30 years, for instance, norms against extramarital cohabitation have relaxed considerably." Given that the study only concerned women during a time period where stigma was even worse than it still is I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this. Choosing a more conventional lifestyle, regardless of what you as an individual genuinely want often takes so much pressure from you that it's hard to discern whether it is you or others who are happy about your decisions. I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable. I think there's a difference between "success" as a consequence of reaping social rewards because you do what is expected of you and genuine individual freedom.
- jfowief 4y ago
  > I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable. Or they feel like failures because they are failures in a biological sense, and they know it deep down due to their biological brain wiring, but they blame their guilt on their parents and society.
Atheros 4y ago
I know that middle-brow dismissals are frowned upon but I want to write this anyway: I will never believe these types of studies without either a control group or better measuring of confounding variables. Health & happiness and marriage both have giant confounding variables like meeting a great partner and being a good partner. The authors claim that they accounted for this but I don't see how. The study is here[1]. > an unmeasured confounder would need to be associated with both incident marriage and mortality by risk ratios of 2.45 each, above and beyond the measured covariates, to fully explain away the observed association between marriage and mortality. I may be interpreting that incorrectly and would appreciate corrections but why is it so unreasonable that meeting a great partner and having kids and thus wanting to strive to be healthier happier person would decrease all-cause mortality by a factor of 2.45 over someone who hadn't accomplished those things? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113323000020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...
DiscourseFan 4y ago
Look I don't think that "hookup culture" is the future, but it is practically speaking impossible to expect women to be full-time employed AND have time to be homemakers. And yet the productivity of our modern economy is based on women's place in the labor market. There are absolutely emotional and psychological benefits of having a committed partner, but how often do marriages end in divorce, how often are people just putting up with each other, and how much sexual frustration and violence on account of it has been generated by socially enforced monogamy? I don't see why we can't aspire to building a better society where women aren't competing tooth and nail for the men who are fighting tooth and nail for the best social status? A truly free society would not be one that is either polyamorous or monogamous but one where the fulfillment of sexual needs is considered a social necessity just like the fulfillment of any other physical need and is addressed as a social problem. Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.
- jfowief 4y ago
  > Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today. I don't even know what that means. People are forced to have sex and rear children?

113 points by lxm 4y ago

Do relationships matter? Yes, of course. We're social beings. That said, and not to get off topic, my theory is we'll eventual discover that there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. For much the same reason studies say people with pets live longer. Yes, there's the emotional companionship (that impacts the physical) but there is also the exposure to another's bacteria. Again, just a theory. But the more I read about "the gut" the more important and influential it's becoming. *based on readings, often here on HN, I'm not a medical professional

GalenErso 4y ago
Yeah. We increasingly want to believe that there exists a viable substitute for everything, that we can have it all. For example, there are clear health benefits associated with long term relationships and marriage. Some antisocial people would like to believe that that doesn't matter because they can replicate these benefits if only they eat clean, exercise, abstain from alcohol, etc. Well, turns out, there are health benefits to LTRs that cannot be replicated otherwise. Your theory is one possibility. But simply eating clean, working out, getting a lot of sleep, drinking water, and having clean bills of health and good blood tests isn't enough. You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. You won't have the discipline to maintain this lifestyle until the end of your life. But you can't enjoy the benefits of singlehood and the benefits of LTRs at the same time. This is controversial. But you can't have it all. You can't optimize your life for everything at the same time. We're disgusted at the idea that we may have to pay a cost or sacrifice something. In this case, sacrificing the freedom of choice and the flexibility that comes with singlehood for the health benefits of LTRs. But no. We want the freedom of choice, the flexibility, and the benefits of LTRs. Similarly, you can't become rich quickly without taking an incredible amount of risk that will in all probability leave you worse off. Other than luck, the true and tried path to long term wealth is to grind for decades at a job or a profession that brings money. Being a doctor, or a FAANG SWE, or starting a business. This all takes hard work and patience. But some people would rather try their hand at get rich quick schemes with cryptocurrency, options trading, or other scams. Very few succeed. That's luck. Most fail.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > You will still die earlier than someone who's not single. This assumes the reason people in LTR's live longer is because of LTR's, and not that healthier or more fit people are more likely to score LTR's. IME people settle once they think a relationship is locked in and let themselves go.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Perhaps. But people who give up on relationships also let themselves go as well. On the other hand, when you're a couple, you might be tempted to let yourself go, but at least there's a chance your mate will refuse to go. Since our behavior is driven by environment (a la we observe the norm, and conform) you'll resist temptation and stay healthy. Habits are easier to maintain when you're not alone. This alone might give couples the edge.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  You've convinced me. Where do I purchase a wife? If she speaks English, that would be a plus.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    OpenAI has a model available that speaks several languages, including English.
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      Perfect, everyone wants to marry a model, right?
      - gnicholas 4y ago
        Perennial submission for the university economics department T-shirt competition: “Economists do it with models”
      - 4y ago
testfoobar 4y ago
> there is a gut microbiome component to couples living longer than singles. Fascinating hypothesis. I wouldn't be surprised that shared diet, living space and activity leads to a converging of gut bacteria. But how would this lead to health and happiness?
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Studies are ahowing gut bacteria has many health implicimplications, tho exact details are still being determined. They also finding a gut to brain connection. I believe they say, we have more bacteria than cells. Makes me wonder who is hosting who. The point is, those bacteria matter.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
A cursory google search suggests that cohabitating couples converge on the same gut biome among various other things like good habits but also bad habits. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458105/ The paper also points out that because of all the concordances, couples tend to share the same downfalls, not just the good things: disease risks, bad diet, bad sleep, emotional turmoil. Seems to defeat your theory.

throwaway8127 4y ago

This article is about women, but I believe the same relationship is seen (perhaps even more strongly) in men. My cynical view is that healthier people are more likely to attract spouses - in other words, that causality runs in the other direction than the commentaries usually imply.

_gmax0 4y ago
Earlier this year I was curious if I could live life as a single male for the rest of my life in a capitalistic Western society that tends to frame many issues from a partisan-listic perspective. I'm no sociologist and did not apply any critical analysis to these works, but most of the literature and surveys I found on this topic suggested that men fare worse than women on health outcomes when it comes to marital/romantic singlehood. The speculative cause was that these women possessed deeper friendships than those men, who tended to be more isolated, especially in later stages of life.
- lockhouse 4y ago
  I think that’s a pretty honest assessment. Data point of one, but my friendships are not nearly as close or deep as those of my wife’s. Additionally, if I got divorced, I’m pretty sure I won’t marry again and the only close relationships I am likely to have later in life are with my children and possibly grandchildren (if they bless me with any).
- ip26 4y ago
  Wives also stereotypically are the ones making their partner go see a doctor about that shooting pain in their chest instead of ignoring it.
- prawn 4y ago
  A married men attains the benefits of a wife promoting a social calendar with her (at least in my case) more numerous friends. This might also be true for anyone in a relationship at all - having a broader circle of friends, and thus social life.

xyzzy4747 4y ago

I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I have to say, when I was single several years ago, my happiness was maybe a 4-5 on a scale of 1-10. I used to feel lonely all the time. Right now I'm married and expecting our first child, and I'd rate it a 7-8 (depending on my mood). Some of that is from being more financially secure though.

prawn 4y ago
I'd guess that in general, some financial security comes from a stable relationship: a shared living environment, efficiencies of scale with things like shopping/cooking, car ownership potentially, utilities from heating/cooling, common cause on other fronts.
dagw 4y ago
Having kids have brought me more happiness and more pain than anything else I have ever done. Using you scale, if I was 5-7 when single and 6-8 when married with no kids, having kids changed it to 2-10.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/zWIAT https://archive.ph/zWIAT

smitty1e 4y ago

[flagged]

tlogan 4y ago

Being alone sucks especially as one ages and faces declining health.

jfowief 4y ago
Given how fast AI is moving, how much longer will this matter?

realjhol 4y ago

Modern society is like a conjurer who whacks your heirloom rolex with a mallet for a trick. When all that remains is a pile of cogs, broken glass and twisted metal, it suddenly dawns on him.... he's forgotten the end of the trick. Modernity: let's smash everything. What can possibly go wrong?

xyzelement 4y ago
What an amazing analogy.
- Loocid 4y ago
  Is it? It seems incredibly forced to me.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    HN thinks anything they agree with is profound even if it’s just bullshit wrapped up in a little paragraph.
  - brunellus 4y ago
    Tolstoy phrased it more beautifully “If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.”
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      Thank you! This made me find the source of the quote and the wiki page on that - very in line with how my own view is evolving.
  - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
    It’s literally a variant of Chesterton’s fence, so it doesn’t seem forced to me.
4y ago

numbers_guy 4y ago

For those who did not read the article, the gold is at the end: Another, perhaps more important change would be for our cultural and economic elite, who are disproportionately likely to be stably married, to preach what they practice—to not only enjoy the benefits of marriage in their private lives but also to advocate for them in public. This is the problem in today's society. You cannot preach good values, because somebody is going to get offended. It is important that all lifestyles are tolerated. But at the same time as a society it is important to instill good values in the next generation, values that will keep them healthy, happy and productive. And the problem is, those values are going to offend someone for sure.

jjj123 4y ago
There are trade offs to either. Your “good values” probably work out well for the majority, and are very punishing to some minority. Mormons have strict social rules that work well a lot of the time, but hurt people who fall outside the majority. They have abnormally high average happiness compared to other groups in the US, but they also have an abnormally high suicide rate.
monero-xmr 4y ago
Where I live is extremely left-leaning and wealthy, and there is intense hate for charters and educational reform of any kind. Yet nearly all the public schools are awful (barring a few exam schools, which these same people are trying to eliminate the exams for!) and everyone with money puts their kids in private school. "Marriage doesn't matter" -> Everyone is married, one of the parents is usually stay-at-home "We support the poor" -> Does everything in their power to ban multi-unit housing and density increases It's incredible the ability for someone to hold one virtue in their head and live the exact opposite without any moral doubts.
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  Who are these "elites" saying "marriage doesn't matter?" Like literally I've never heard an economic or educational elite talk in a disparaging way about marriage in my entire life of living and working among them. The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."

snvzz 4y ago

>A new study shows that for women, getting married is linked to significantly better physical and mental health For Women, specifically. This is very important and omitted from the HN headline.

doitLP 4y ago
Because that was the cohort studied, not because the opposite is true for men only. As it says in the article previous studies indicate the effects may be even greater for men.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

m-watson 4y ago

Here is the paper they are talking about https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113323000020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...

xracy 4y ago

I think there is a lot of societal pressure to get married/be in a relationship. As such, I think it would be pretty hard to claim that the benefits of marriage are separate from the benefits of not fighting societal pressures in your day-to-day. Or if you could prove that, I think it would be an interesting study.

xyzelement 4y ago
That doesn't make sense. As a male new yorker I faced zero societal pressure to do basically anything traditional. I am happy as a married dude because my life has infinite more meaning and impact when I am being a husband and a father, versus whatever I was up to before.
- MiguelX413 4y ago
  I may not necessarily agree with it either, but it makes perfect sense and your evidence is completely anecdotal.
  - xracy 4y ago
    I would argue his evidence isn't even evidence against my point. Since he probably doesn't realize the societal pressures that got him into being married. :) But it's also definitely anecdotal. My counter-evidence is somewhat anecdotally motivated, but I've definitely lived in all kinds of places where there's strong societal incentives to get married (for one thing, at a baseline, taxes).

JoeJonathan 4y ago

Isn’t this really just because married partners can share health care? /jk But really, I’d like to see more attention to how many of these effects are due to the ways in which marriages are legally recognized and respected in ways that other monogamous long term relationships are not. I’d also like to know why, if LIBERALS HATE MARRIAGE so much, they spent decades fighting for the right to gay marriage?

klysm 4y ago
The only part of marriage that bothers me is not about marriage itself, but how it is codified into legislation and being married can have significant financial implications
- xyzelement 4y ago
  If marriage is a virtuous institution that improves well being of society and brings about the next generation, why shouldn't it be promoted this way?
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    1 - Does such direct promotion actually work? My vague impression is "poorly, at best". 2 - How much overhead cost (especially legal & bureaucratic) does the promotion create? Note that politicians getting to congratulate themselves on being yet more pro-marriage is not a benefit for society.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      It at the very least sends a message about what our society values. Something I noticed is at least nominally rewarded by the tax code: be married, have kids, buy a house, save energy, give charity. All the right messages.
      - loeg 4y ago
        Prior to like, 2017, the tax code used to impose a significant marriage penalty on couples with similar incomes; now it only imposes some smaller penalties. It is extremely recent that the tax code wasn't an active disincentive to get married for many couples. Being married is mostly not rewarded, unless one partner is a homemaker. (Home ownership, parenting, and charity are rewarded by the tax code in a way that is unrelated to marriage.) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marriage-penalty.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marriage-penalty.asp

ra1231963 4y ago

Getting relationship advice from the hacker news crowd is like getting vegetarian recipes from a butcher

xyzelement 4y ago
I don't get your point. We are a diverse crowd. Personally, I've lived what is pretty close to the highlight of single life (dating on NYC, traveling to 20-30 countries a year, etc) and now am a boring but super happy suburban dad of 2 (and hoping for more) - you don't think someone like me can offer an insight on what works and why?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > traveling to 20-30 countries a year No, probably not. Whatever your life circumstances are, they're so ridiculously far outside the norm that almost nothing about your life applies to most people's.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    I am making an extreme point. Whatever people's idealized single life is, working in finance/tech in NYC, dating and traveling would be on that list. And I can still articulate why married life is way better for me.
    - throwawytroll6 4y ago
      [unnecessarily toxic]
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        I am referring to the opportunity cost. I had the most "fun" to give up.
    - _gmax0 4y ago
      'Whatever people's idealized single life is, working in finance/tech in NYC, dating and traveling would be on that list.' This is where you begin to overgeneralize.

Barrin92 4y ago

"We also have to be cautious in generalizing across generations. The Gen-Xers in our sample were deciding for or against marriage in a different cultural setting than young adults today. In the past 30 years, for instance, norms against extramarital cohabitation have relaxed considerably." Given that the study only concerned women during a time period where stigma was even worse than it still is I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this. Choosing a more conventional lifestyle, regardless of what you as an individual genuinely want often takes so much pressure from you that it's hard to discern whether it is you or others who are happy about your decisions. I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable. I think there's a difference between "success" as a consequence of reaping social rewards because you do what is expected of you and genuine individual freedom.

jfowief 4y ago
> I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable. Or they feel like failures because they are failures in a biological sense, and they know it deep down due to their biological brain wiring, but they blame their guilt on their parents and society.

Atheros 4y ago

I know that middle-brow dismissals are frowned upon but I want to write this anyway: I will never believe these types of studies without either a control group or better measuring of confounding variables. Health & happiness and marriage both have giant confounding variables like meeting a great partner and being a good partner. The authors claim that they accounted for this but I don't see how. The study is here[1]. > an unmeasured confounder would need to be associated with both incident marriage and mortality by risk ratios of 2.45 each, above and beyond the measured covariates, to fully explain away the observed association between marriage and mortality. I may be interpreting that incorrectly and would appreciate corrections but why is it so unreasonable that meeting a great partner and having kids and thus wanting to strive to be healthier happier person would decrease all-cause mortality by a factor of 2.45 over someone who hadn't accomplished those things? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113323000020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259011332...

DiscourseFan 4y ago

Look I don't think that "hookup culture" is the future, but it is practically speaking impossible to expect women to be full-time employed AND have time to be homemakers. And yet the productivity of our modern economy is based on women's place in the labor market. There are absolutely emotional and psychological benefits of having a committed partner, but how often do marriages end in divorce, how often are people just putting up with each other, and how much sexual frustration and violence on account of it has been generated by socially enforced monogamy? I don't see why we can't aspire to building a better society where women aren't competing tooth and nail for the men who are fighting tooth and nail for the best social status? A truly free society would not be one that is either polyamorous or monogamous but one where the fulfillment of sexual needs is considered a social necessity just like the fulfillment of any other physical need and is addressed as a social problem. Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.

jfowief 4y ago
> Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today. I don't even know what that means. People are forced to have sex and rear children?