MARRIAGE MAKES YOU LIVE LONGER

News

Marriage makes people live longer. That’s the consistent finding of research over the years, and it’s confirmed in a new study from Copenhagen Business School published by Cambridge University Press.

“It is clear that marriage is associated with the highest life expectancies compared to non-married individuals”, the authors write. At age 50, married people look forward to five to eight years longer life than single people who have never married.

The authors point to research showing that this is primarily because of the protective effect of marriage rather than being an artefact of the kind of people who get married. In other words, it’s the magic of marriage that gives people more years to live.

But of course, at C4M we know there’s nothing magical about it. The public commitment of a man and a woman to share life together “in sickness and in health, till death do us part” creates stable homes and families where individuals, whatever their age, are never left to struggle alone.

Some of this benefit is enjoyed by the increasing number of couples who live together without getting married, the authors find. However, they state “married individuals are in most cases living statistically significantly longer than those who are cohabiting”.

This confirms what we at C4M already know: that the public promises of marriage and the private assurances those reflect make a real, lasting impact on people’s lives.

Once again, researchers have found that it’s marriage that makes the difference. Whether it’s in happiness, health, stability, children’s well-being and achievements or the very years of life we have left to live, evidence consistently shows that real marriage is the gold standard for human relationships. Isn’t it high time it was treated that way once again?