Rachel’s Musings

A study published in the September edition of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior is in the news. The researchers, Debra Umberson and Hui Liu, looked at data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972-2003 to investigate the health of married and non-married people. Michigan State University summarized their findings:

The health of people who never marry is improving, narrowing the gap with their wedded counterparts, according to new research that suggests the practice of encouraging marriage to promote health may be misguided.
[...]
Further, the research shows that the health status of the never-married has improved for all race and gender groups examined: men, women, blacks and whites. (The health of married women also improved, while the health of married men remained stable.)

“Politicians and scholars continue to debate the value of marriage for Americans,” the researchers write in the study, “with some going so far as to establish social programs and policies to encourage marriage among those socials groups less inclined to marry, particularly the poor and minorities.”

But the research findings “highlight the complexity of this issue” and suggest that “encouraging marriage in order to promote health may be misguided.”

(Unfortunately, I don’t yet have free access to the actual journal article, so I am relying on press releases…)

News reports on the study differ in their take of the results: While some emphasize that marriage isn’t necessary to remain healthy, others still try to use it as encouragement for marriage. Yet, despite their headline, the news story admits that the changes in marital behavior had a positive impact on health of never-married people.

What is not clear from the news articles is whether the researchers distinguished between never-married singles and cohabiting people - both are unmarried. Cohabitation has increased and is widely viewed as an acceptable alternative to marriage. If, as Liu asserts, never-marrieds have “greater access to social support now than they did in the past” and that is an important reason for these findings, cohabitation would need to be factored into the equation.

Even with this caveat, the overall research finding is positive: We can be healthy no matter what our relationship status. And even though most of us singles and unmarrieds knew that, we now have the data to support the claim.

(Hat tip to Brian for pointing me to this study!)

As Bella DePaulo has pointed out in a recent blog post, there are several new documentaries on singles out. I wonder if I just watched the third one she mentioned (unfortunately, the spam filter at PT seems to reject any comment that contains the word “single,” so I can’t ask Bella…): “Single: A Documentary,” which shows DePaulo briefly but, unfortunately, not every time someone voiced a singlist or matrimanical opinion. I suppose that would’ve ended up being a documentary about singlism featuring DePaulo because she’d been all over the place! Unless they’re doing a complete 360 in the part that I missed, the message of the documentary is clear: If you’re single, you are selfish, suffer from ADD, too lazy to be in a relationship, and will live unhappily ever after. That people could choose to be single was completely not mentioned… That marriage is an institution that might need some serious questioning didn’t seem to occur to the film makers (although some of the people interviewed started down that path).

I am very disappointed because the documentary has a cast, which includes - aside from DePaulo - Stephanie Coontz. The trailer, though, already indicates the direction of the whole documentary: Despite doing lip-service to the idea that being single isn’t a problem, the goal in life should still be to get (and stay) married. So, I should’ve known that despite DePaulo, this wasn’t a documentary that would shatter myths. And if I had paid better attention, I would have noticed that Barbara DaFoe Whitehead, one of the cast members, is the author of “Dan Quale was Right,” an article published in 1993 that Nancy Polikoff sees as part of a rhetorical shift that “traced all social problems to the decline of marriage and invoked at the solution restoring lifelong marriage to its proper place” (67-68). Sigh. Well, don’t make my mistake and save your money or buy a book. Unless you’re interested in being depressed about being single or dating, you can skip this documentary…

I just finished Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s wonderful book “Liberty: A Better Husband. Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780 – 1840.” It is a great read for any single by choice because it provides some historical grounding: there were women in antebellum America who chose to remain single for various reasons and some of them were actually rather happy with that choice. Chambers argues that the Cult of Domesticity gave rise to a Cult of Single Blessedness that was built on the notion that it is better to be single than miserably married (17). Her book follows several women through their life - using their journals, letters, and in some cases professional publications. They struggle with finding their place in society, often making great personal sacrifices to live with the choices they made. Largely, though, they were accepted by society - until after the Civil War. Then things changed. Singlehood became a “great social disease.” Singlism was born.

The arguments brought forth sound strangely and sadly familiar: “The root of the great error of our day is, that woman is to be made independent and self-supporting,” warned Reverend John Todd in 1867 (190). It wasn’t God’s will for her to be something other than a wife and mother. And just like today, the specter of damaging health consequences was raised. Edward Clarke argued in 1873 that women’s blood cannot support their reproductive organs and their brains at the same time. He forecast that women end up “hermaphrodite in mind.” And of course, putting all that blood into the brain has painful consequences for the single woman. Since she hasn’t used her reproductive capacity, the organs will shrivel up and a painful menopause sets in (192). (Maybe these are the theoretical underpinnings of the recent headlines that marriage makes people smarter? Oh, wait, no, that would be the other way round, right? Because if you were married back then, you’d likely have all your blood tied up in the reproductive system, which would leave any blood for your brain, so you’d be stupider… I am digressing, though.)

But the impact of celibacy is not limited to the reproductive organs. No, the medical community of the late 19th century warned, spinsters will die younger: “Very carefully prepared statistics show that between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, more unmarried women die than married, and no instance of remarkable longevity in an old maid is known” (193). Of course, ignorance is not evidence but that argument was pre-baloney detection kit… (Then again, if you’re male and live in Australia, you’re still pushed into marriage with the carrot that you’ll be living longer. Having read much of Bella DePaulo’s work debunking studies like this, I suspect that this finding is as solid as thin ice… Update: One of the Rachel’s Musings readers pointed me to an article on a recent U of Michigan study that is also debunking that marriage is the only way to stay healthy. I’ll incorporate more in a future post!)

If it doesn’t kill us, it will drive us nuts: “throughout the civilized word there are every where three to four single to one married woman in the establishments for the insane” (193). Being exposed to these kinds of attitudes can indeed lead to insanity…

To make sure that the single woman can safely be marginalized in society, everything considered not “normal” was brought together in a sure-fire mix to discredit the health of a spinster. As Chambers puts it: “Celibacy, often a symptom of that new female sexual disease, frigidity, would result in physical and mental degeneracy. Homosexuality and female independence were degenerate in and of themselves. Thus the epidemic of spinsterhood had to be quashed. The progress of civilization and the health of women depended up it.” With that much danger, it is surprising that single women weren’t burned at the stake. Oh, wait, that was a different century…

It is sad to realize that many of the stereotypes that were created after the Civil War are still around today. If we’re single, there’s somehow something wrong with us. We’re (supposedly!) more susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease and our blood pressure is higher. Seeing the historical continuity of these attacks doesn’t make them any less painful. Actually, it makes them more painful! And they make me wonder: Why are single women so threatening? Oh, wait, I think I know: If you make the whole existence of civilization dependent on marriage, of course, living single would be a big threat. That is the myth we’re up against.

Bella DePaulo blogged about a recent BBC report on a presentation of findings from a Finish study on Alzheimer’s disease. The headline everywhere seems to be: to prevent Alzheimer’s, we should marry! Digging into the study some more - which has not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal - the first thing that struck me: Alzheimer’s is not very prevalent. Out of 1,432 study participants,

139 were diagnosed with some form of cognitive impairment, including 82 with mild cognitive impairment — which may represent a transitional phase between normal age-related memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease — and 48 with Alzheimer’s.

Let’s see… 139/1432 = 9.7% and 48/1432 = 3.4%. So, out of a hundred people, about 3 people will get Alzheimer’s; 97 people will not. This are small numbers. Granted, having worked with people at the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the disease is devastating but apparently not quite as prevalent as the news coverage seems to suggest. In contrast, almost 4 times as many people have heart disease (11%). It is about as prevalent as stroke (2.6%, Table 2). And 7 out of a 100 people will get any type of cancer (Table 6)

Nevertheless, if we do want to prevent Alzheimer’s - the study claims - we just have to be married. Never mind that

The association with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease did not reach statistical significance.

But, okay, the difference in other cognitive impairments between singles and marrieds is statistically significant. However, there is something else that plays a role:

Having the APOE-e4 genotype — a risk factor for Alzheimer’s — was particularly damaging for those who were widowed or divorced from midlife through late life. Those who were married and had the high-risk genotype had a 3.44-fold (P<0.05) increased risk of Alzheimer's disease, compared with a 25.55-fold (P<0.001) greater risk for those who were divorced or widowed.

I have no idea what that genotype is but to me this finding that married folks have a lower risk of Alzheimer’s than divorced or widowed is, well, nice but not at all actionable. What are we to do? Ask people to get married to prevent Alzheimer’s? This would go down the (wrong) road of using marriage as a panacea, which it is not. Plus, causality - marriage prevents Alzheimer’s - cannot be established by this kind of study. It would require an experiment where people are randomly assigned to the “marriage condition.” Since that is not very ethical, we can’t conduct such a study. We can use longitudinal studies to approximate this, watching people with changing marital status. However, as the researcher pointed out, there might be other things at play here, too:

This suggested, Hakansson said, that other factors beyond cohabitation were involved in the associations. [...]

Hakansson speculated that those who were widowed or divorced — and remained so — were at a greater risk than those who were single because the loss of a partner destabilized the psychobiological system, enhancing vulnerability to disease.

Maybe stress is the mediating factor, not marital status? Loosing your spouse - through death or divorce - certainly is stressful!

Now, is there anything we can do to prevent Alzheimer’s? There is apparently a “general hypothesis of social stimulation as a protective factor against dementia.” So, be social and be active! Start a walking group where you skeptically dissect news reports on what benefits marriage are supposed to bestow upon us. If nothing else, you’ll prevent heart disease through the walking…

When challenging the preferential status of marriage, I am often countered with “but marriage is natural!” No, it is not. Reading about the history of marriage in general and in the US in particular, it is clear that marriage is an institution created with specific civic purposes, which changed over time but were always there. In the US, it is steeped in the Christian tradition of monogamy, which the founding fathers imposed on the new nation.

Of course, this is avoiding the real question: Is coupling natural?      Continue reading this post » » »

Aside from Nancy Polikoff’s recently published book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, there is also an online statement calling for activists, especially in the LGBT movement, to move beyond marriage, which goes back to July 2006. It is an encouraging affirmation of all forms of relationships and families.

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

     Continue reading this post » » »