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As far back as the late 1800s, epidemiologist William Farr studied the condition of marriage on people's health in France by dividing the adult population into three separate categories: the married, the celibate (those never married) and the widowed. When he analyzed the relative mortality rates of all three groups at various ages, the epidemiologist found the death rates of the unmarried to be much higher in proportion to the marrieds, with the widowed faring worst of all.
So, in a nutshell: Marriage is good for your health. Lots of subsequent studies back that up.
But not so fast. It's further complicated when you imagine lots of different scenarios, like these: Is someone who has always been happily single not as healthy as someone who is happily married? Or is someone who is happily divorced not as healthy as someone who is happily married? Not sure. Or does being married, period -- even if it's a lousy one -- offer health benefits, too?
One answer may be found here: Last year, when researchers at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago studied four key aspects of midlife health -- chronic conditions, mobility limitations, self-rated health and depressive symptoms -- they found that divorce or spousal death often had a prolonged impact and negatively affected all four areas. And the researchers also found that multiple divorces -- which no doubt create lots of stress and feelings of loss and powerlessness -- are far worse than never marrying at all.
But what does seem obvious here is that if you are married, it behooves you to work on keeping that union happy for the sake of your health.
And that's where my friend, fellow blogger and author Alisa Bowman comes in. Out of her extremely sage and sane marriage advice blog grew her book. You see, some years ago, Alisa was busy planning her own husband's funeral. No, it wasn't because he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. It was for the simple reason that her marriage was extremely unhappy, and contemplating her husband's death felt way easier than contemplating divorce or even contemplating a way to make her marriage, which then felt totally and forever hopeless, better.
Alisa new book, Project Happily Ever After: Saving Your Marriage When the Fairytale Falters, chronicles her intense four-month project to save her marriage. I asked Alisa about her experiences.
Q. Why did you choose to share your story?
When I was working on my marriage, I felt so alone. I thought I was the only person in the world who was stuck in a bad marriage. I felt like a loser for allowing my marriage to fall apart. I was ashamed, embarrassed, depressed and hopeless.
After working on and improving my marriage, I began talking about the experience here and there. At book club I might mention something about the novel I had been writing about the wife who kills her husband and gets away with it. Over coffee I might tell a friend about how I once planned his funeral.
What I learned was startling: I wasn't alone. Most of the people I opened up to had similar stories to share. About the death fantasy, one of my friends said, "I think we've all been there at one time or another, haven't we?"
It made me want to share it all with a wider audience. I wanted others to know that they were not alone. I also wanted them to know that there was hope.
Q. Professionally, you write about a lot of things, among them health. What types of health-related problems, whether they manifest themselves physically or mentally, most commonly occur from unhappy marriages? And, if you care to get personal here, did your own health suffer as a result of your unhappy marriage –- and conversely, improve once your own marriage improved?
Sure, an unhappy marriage is a stressor -- one that affects the body much like depression, anger, anxiety and other negative emotions do. When my marriage was at its worst, I was exhausted. I kept coming down with colds and other illnesses. I had a stress disorder that was so bad that I even went to my doctor and told him that I thought I was having a heart attack. He sent me to a stress reduction class, and that class led to me finding the clarity and courage I needed
