The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (32 page)

THE MARITAL DOGHOUSE

Of course, sustaining a long, stable marriage is no picnic, as I discovered at the first social event I attended with my husband’s colleagues after I returned from my honeymoon in the 1980s. It was a black-tie banquet at a downtown hotel, which I recall as a long evening of stale Henny Youngman jokes. Suddenly trussed up in evening wear, and jet-lagged to boot, I felt adrift in an undifferentiated sea of middle-aged men in ill-fitting tuxedoes. Some of them were gleeful as they trotted out cynical chestnuts like “A marriage is a fortress—those outside are fighting to get in while those inside are fighting to get out.” Despite the snide tenor of the teasing, which I found as unsettling as the phalanx of silverware framing my gold-rimmed hotel plate, this predominantly male crowd was predominantly married. Divorce had taken its toll—this was the 1980s after all, when divorce rates were at their peak. But even the men whose first marriages had ended in divorce had been confident enough to marry again.
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“If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ve got to buy two separate books,” quipped comedian Alan King, who in fact stayed married to the same woman for fifty-seven years, from the age of twenty until he died in 2004, at the age of seventy-seven. Like my dinner companions that night, it didn’t so much matter what
he
did; the point was that, out there in the world, the romantic view of marriage had soured.

Their remarks reflected a massive attitude shift. In 1957 an American survey revealed that four out of five people believed that anyone who chose to be single was “sick, neurotic, or immoral.”
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But by the early eighties the situation had reversed: marriage was in the doghouse. “The reasons for the revolution were many,” author Kay Hymowitz writes of the trend away from marriage and toward single motherhood, including “the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of
anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.”
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Extending well into the twenty-first century, popular culture reflected the ambivalence, if not downright hostility, people felt about marriage as an institution. One-liners, TV sitcoms, and song lyrics mocked the idea that marriage could be the route to intimacy and happiness. The data, though, tell a very different story.

THE SCIENCE OF MARRIAGE

Over the past fifteen years, psychologists and physiologists have joined forces in an effort to show that face-to-face contact with your partner—specifically your level of intimacy and how you deal with conflict—can have a huge impact on your health. Even passable marriages provide a physiological umbrella that bolsters both spouses’ immunity and resilience. The benefits accrue to men and women both, though not equally. Unmarried women are 50 percent more likely to die young than married women, while single or divorced men are
250 percent
more likely to die prematurely than married men are at any age.
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Being married significantly reduces your chances of being hospitalized, needing surgery, dying in the hospital after surgery or within fifteen years of a coronary bypass procedure; developing pneumonia, rheumatoid arthritis, gum disease, a viral infection, dementia, clinical depression, a serious cardiac event, or a variety of horrible cancers; going to jail, being murdered, dying in a car accident, or taking your own life. Much of this research is new. Though it’s long been known that suicide kills four times as many men as women and twice as many single men as married ones (French sociologist Emile Durkheim described the phenomenon in the late nineteenth century), it has taken well over a hundred years to begin to map out the physiological pathways that transform the lack of enduring romantic bonds into a list of identifiable diseases.
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Admittedly, it’s an impressive list. “In countries as diverse as Japan and the Netherlands, the unmarried die off much faster and sooner than the married” is how sociologist Linda Waite and her co-author, Maggie Gallagher, baldly put it in
The Case for Marriage
. They might have added the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Israel, Hungary, and the Scandinavian countries while they were at it.
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Except in developing nations—where, shockingly, pregnancy and childbirth are still the leading causes of death for married women of reproductive age—the longevity gap between married and single people continues to widen, with married men now living an average of seven years longer than single men, and married women living an average of three years longer than never-married women. Clearly there is something about the special attention spouses offer each other that trumps being footloose and fancy-free.
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The lifesaving properties of marriage could be as concrete as having someone there to call an ambulance in the middle of the night or to notice a new mole right between the shoulder blades. Or it could be as mysterious as stress hormones hitching a ride in our blood cells as they move through our bodies, touching every nerve, joint, and muscle within.

BETTER THAN YOGA, BLACK COHOSH, AND ECHINACEA COMBINED

In 2008, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues strapped blood pressure monitors onto three hundred adults. Though some were single and others were married, their levels of physical and mental health were fairly similar; at the outset of the experiment there were no measurable differences between married and singles in how stressed out or depressed they were. The group wore the monitors nonstop for twenty-four hours, the blood pressure cuff automatically inflating and deflating as the subjects went about their day, eating, working, walking, talking, resting, arguing.

The results showed that adults who were happily married had lower nighttime blood pressure, and thus a lower risk of being cut down by a catastrophic cardiac event, than single people did. Their marriages were literally protecting their hearts while they were sleeping. Though singles were better off than those in miserable marriages, there was also something uniquely protective about simply being married. While the singles’ happiness was closely connected to being surrounded by friends and extended family, the researchers found that this type of social support didn’t have the same protective effect on the thrumming of their hearts as a longstanding, stable marriage.
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A happy marriage also has an invisible impact on whether women sleep well. A team led by Wendy Troxel, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh, interviewed nearly two thousand married middle-aged American women about their sleep patterns. They found that happily married women had far fewer sleep problems, even when the researchers controlled for other sources of insomnia such as money or work worries, their husbands’ snoring, their sex lives, or their caffeine consumption. Being happily married meant falling asleep quickly, waking less, and sleeping more peacefully. Interestingly, compared to women who had lots of social support from friends and family, only a good marriage predicted whether they were getting a good night’s rest. “Those marriages that provide a sense of security should promote sleep,” Dr. Troxel said, “whereas those that are a source of stress should promote vigilance, which is the opposite of falling into a deep sleep.” As in Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s study of nighttime blood pressure, a particular type of face-to-face relationship allowed women to let down their guards and let their bodies rest. But a prior history of instability in their romantic relationships—being separated, widowed, or divorced—scuttled that possibility.
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SEX DIFFERENCES AND MARITAL STRIFE

If a good marriage protects your health, does a hostile or hollow marriage damage it? Sadly, the answer is yes. An unhappy relationship is physiologically corrosive; it’s not simply experienced as less support, fewer lifts to the doctor, or bowls of chicken soup.
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“When love was strong, we could have made our bed on a sword’s blade; now when it has become weak, a bed of sixty cubits is not large enough for us,” a second-century rabbi commented in the Talmud. That emotional distance, whether writ in separate beds or separate custody arrangements, can be read in one’s vital signs. But, by and large, men and women don’t have the same physiological reactions to marital distance and distress.

Women are more likely than men to register the effects of stonewalling, contempt, and conflict directly in their vascular and immune systems. In fact, just thinking about a long-past marital conflict can raise a woman’s (but not a man’s) blood pressure. For women, emotional memory is so transformative that it can activate the same damaging neural networks as experiencing the conflict did in the first place.
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This happens automatically and without our consent.

As we’ve seen, people who have a low opinion of their marital togetherness have higher nighttime blood pressure and thus a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. This is especially true for women, whose heart rates and blood pressure are more sensitive to social cues.
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In fact, the quality of their marriage is so predictive of women’s cardiovascular health that a long-running Finnish study showed that women whose marriages were colored by “considerable conflict” were two and a half times more likely than other women to be classified as physically disabled when the researchers followed up on them six years later. These findings were replicated by a Swedish team, who found that middle-aged women with a history of heart disease had three times the risk of another heart attack if their marriages were unhappy.
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Conversely,
another study found that women with the same type of medical history were less likely to die if they had found true companionship in their marriage.
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All evidence points to irresolvable marital conflict being experienced by women as an illness with long-term physical consequences.

For men, marital conflict wasn’t the issue. It was keeping their cards close to their chest that proved dangerous. Men with a cardiac history are less likely to have chest pains, to be re-hospitalized, or to die if they are able to confide in their wives, according to work by Carnegie-Mellon University’s Vicki Helgeson.
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More than anything else, it was emotional bonding that predicted their survival—a theme I’ll return to in a moment. For now, though, consider that problem marriages affect men and women differently. The doyenne of research on marital stress, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, put it this way: “Wives demonstrated greater and more persistent physiological changes related to marital conflict than husbands.” This was true whether the women were newlyweds or veterans of fifty-year marathon marriages.
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Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, whom I met at a psychology conference in 2010, is a petite blond with a no-nonsense style. She is also a powerhouse of scientific productivity. She belongs to an elite club of social scientists who have teamed up with their spouses to answer some basic questions about human nature, such as why we need another person’s love to survive. Kiecolt-Glaser works closely with her husband, viral immunologist Ronald Glaser, to explore the science of love and attachment. Other married social psychology club members have spent their work and married lives investigating why our long-term bonds matter. They include developmental psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and his wife, Patricia Kuhl (whom we met in
Chapter 5
), who have shown that babies need face-to-face contact in order to acquire the specifics of human language and empathy; social psychologists Roy Baumeister and
Dianne Tice, who share a research lab in Florida and together have mapped out much of what we know about why people feel the need to belong; and behavioral neurobiologist Sue Carter—the person who discovered that oxytocin fosters monogamy—and her husband, neuroscientist Stephen Porges, who have forever changed the way we think about the brass tacks of romantic commitment. And we’ve already met married primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, who have made it patently clear that our complex web of social relationships—including our interest in who is sleeping with whom—is hardly uniquely human if it’s shared with the chacma baboon.

But let’s get back to Kiecolt-Glaser and Ron Glaser for a moment. The couple has found that recurring marital conflict leads to wild fluctuations in a woman’s production of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and corticotropin—hormones that register fear and stress. Long-term high levels of these hormones impair the cardiovascular and immune systems. It’s different for men, for whom lack of companionship in marriage is far more damaging, especially as many can’t get that feeling of closeness anywhere else.
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For many men, their one and only intimate friend is their wife. Meanwhile, their wives are more likely to surround themselves with a tight circle of close friends and family. This “village” is not only indispensable to their own health and happiness but provides a protective umbrella for the men they marry.

Interestingly, women don’t have a monopoly on close circles of female friends who are always there backstage to bolster their spirits—and immune systems—when the chips are down. The bonds formed among nonhuman female primates are legendary. And the female chacma baboons with the strongest, most enduring female relationships also secrete lower levels of stress hormones than others, according to research by UCLA primatologist Joan Silk and her colleagues. These highly social baboons also raise more offspring to adulthood and live longer than their more solitary sisters.
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In the longest-running study of baboons to date, Silk and her team monitored 108 females from two groups of baboons, one living in Kenya’s Amboseli Park, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, and the other near the Okavango Delta, in Botswana’s Moremi Reserve. The researchers discovered that the most social baboon mothers, the ones with a tightly integrated circle of friends and family members, had the highest number of surviving offspring. Social integration trumped rank and even environmental conditions in predicting which baboon’s infants would make it to their first birthday. The size of the baboon sisterhood numbered around six. “To have a top three seems to be what’s important here,” Joan Silk said of the “strong, stable relationships that help females cope better with stress.”
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