Marital Stress Escalates Heart Disease

How good are our relationships for our health? (photo by LivligaHome)

 We have all heard about how being married is considered healthier for our bodies and minds than being single. I have always wondered about that. Could it really be true being married is better for us than remaining single? It always seemed to me it would depend on the type of marriage someone has-- is it a marriage where spouses like each other and support each other or are couples always snarking at each other, arguing and spending most of their time apart. It turns out, according to a recent study, it does matter what kind of marriage you are in. A bad marriage can actually hurt your heart! Here is what I read:

Being in an unhappy marriage can break your heart—literally. A new study from sociologists at Michigan State University indicates that people in contentious marriages are much more likely to develop heart disease than their more happily wed contemporaries. Studying five years of data taken from 12,000 adults ages 57 to 85, researchers were able to compare overall heart health—measured by such factors as cholesterol levels and the occurrence of heart attacks or strokes—to how participants answered a series of questions about their marriages. Previous studies have shown that married people tend to be healthier overall, but this study found that the stress of an unhappy union outweighs the usual benefits of marriage. “It’s not that every marriage is better than none,” study author Hui Liu tells WashingtonPost.com. “The quality of marriage is really important.”

Source: The Week