There are wide-ranging health ben­e­fits to be gained from being hap­pily mar­ried, the research sug­gests, but just how exten­sive this effect is (and its intri­ca­cies) is hugely surprising.

In Tara Parker-Pope’s com­pre­hen­sive look at the phys­i­o­log­i­cal effects of mar­riage, we are told how just by get­ting cou­ples to dis­cuss a mar­i­tal dis­agree­ment their heal­ing of wounds can be delayed by days; that those in unhappy rela­tion­ships have weak­ened immune sys­tems; and most sur­pris­ingly that when women were sub­jected to mild elec­tric shocks (to sim­u­late stress) hold­ing the hand of their hus­bands “resulted in a calm­ing of the brain regions asso­ci­ated with pain sim­i­lar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug”.

[Stud­ies] have shown that mar­ried peo­ple are less likely to get pneu­mo­nia, have surgery, develop can­cer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being mar­ried or cohab­it­ing at midlife is asso­ci­ated with a lower risk for demen­tia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Nether­lands found that in vir­tu­ally every cat­e­gory, rang­ing from vio­lent deaths like homi­cide and car acci­dents to cer­tain forms of can­cer, the unmar­ried were at far higher risk than the married.

What if you get divorced or are wid­owed? Remar­riage won’t help and you will suf­fer “a decline in phys­i­cal health from which [you will] never fully recover”. In these cases even the sin­gle­tons fared bet­ter (tra­di­tion­ally con­sid­ered to be worse-off due to hav­ing fewer resources and less emo­tional and logis­ti­cal support).

How dif­fer­ent styles of con­flict (and con­flict res­o­lu­tion) affected the sexes dif­fer­ently was fas­ci­nat­ing, too:

The women in his study who were at high­est risk for signs of heart dis­ease were those whose mar­i­tal bat­tles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endear­ment dur­ing a hos­tile dis­cus­sion […] or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can sig­nal affec­tion in the midst of anger. “Most of the lit­er­a­ture assumes that it’s how bad the argu­ments get that dri­ves the effect, but it’s actu­ally the lack of affec­tion that does it […] It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that pre­dicted risk.”

For men, on the other hand, hos­tile and neg­a­tive mar­i­tal bat­tles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk […] when their mar­i­tal spats turned into bat­tles for con­trol. It didn’t mat­ter whether it was the hus­band or wife who was try­ing to gain con­trol of the mat­ter; it was merely any appear­ance of con­trol­ling lan­guage that put men on the path of heart disease.

In both cases, the emo­tional tone of a mar­i­tal fight turned out to be just as pre­dic­tive of poor heart health as whether the indi­vid­ual smoked or had high cho­les­terol. […] The solu­tion, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fight­ing. It’s to fight more thoughtfully.

via Mind Hacks