The Global Sociology Blog

Via Context Crawler comes this story reported in the Detroit Free Press :

"Single guys, rejoice! A new 30-year study from Michigan State University released Monday suggests that never-married men are quickly becoming as healthy as their married counterparts.

However, marriage is still meaningful, the authors said, as widowers reported themselves in poorer health than husbands. The gap widened every year.

MSU author Hui Liu, assistant professor of sociology, said Monday the study shows that policy promoting marriage for health may be outdated, as other forms of long-term commitment become more common.

The study also suggests that widows and widowers need strong reinforcement and community support help to keep themselves mentally and physically healthy."

This is not exactly surprising. As a variety of family forms become more common and more socially acceptable, one can expect that the stigma attached to perceived alternative structures would decline and the various gaps would be reduced.

As for widowers, well, Durkheim had that one figured out when he studied suicide. Widowers had a higher suicide rate because of the change from being married to being widowed and the changes in their lives brought about by this transition.

In this sense, singles, not having experience the transition from singlehood to marriage, are not missing anything whereas widowers, having learned to depend upon another person (and in Durkheim’s times, such dependence might have been even greater) found themselves more isolated and with, all of a sudden, more domestic responsibilities than before.

If we consider suicide a form of ill health, the same would be true today for health in general. This is especially the case since we know that, within couples, it is usually wives who remind their husbands to get physicals, eat healthy, etc. And in spite of progress in terms of domestic equality, most of the housekeeping burden still falls on the shoulders of wives. So, widowers would find themselves, again, deprived of a partner upon whom they had learned to depend for their general health.

In other words, here is another good reason not to hold on to outdated and incorrect conceptions of family structure to design public policy.

Note on methodology from the article:

"Liu studied more than 1 million surveys taken by people 25 to 80 years old between 1972 and 2003. Each year, more never-married men described themselves as healthy, a number starting to catch up with married men.

For widowers, the gap between their health and the health of married men widened over 30 years. Liu said she thinks there are several reasons.

"People live longer, and the marriage duration increases over time," she said. It’s more stressful when that long-term companion dies.

The survey doesn’t consistently distinguish between mental and physical health, so she plans on looking at whether social interactions in the widowed population improve both mental and physical health."