Married men tend to live longer than those who aren’t, so it seems to be true that marriage supports a healthy life in most cases! It also seems like marriage is the reason that they see doctors more often for check ups, and have a lower risk of death from a heart attack or stroke!
But why is that?
A new study may offer a clue: Men who experience chest pains while having a heart attack tend to get to a hospital sooner if they’re married or in a common-law relationship.
That still doesn’t tell us why though!
The caregiving role many women play in their marriages is so ubiquitous and ingrained that a wife might not even need to be physically present during a heart attack to have a good influence on her husband, Dr. Atzema adds.
“The man, just knowing that when his wife gets back and finds out that he had a heart attack and waited five, six hours—his anticipation of that may make him seek care more quickly and effectively than the actual chest pain will,” she says.
“There are stories about men running up flights of stairs to prove to themselves that they are not having a heart attack,” says Kiecold-Glaser, who has studied the health benefits of marriage but was not involved in the new research. “In general, wives pay far more attention to husbands’ health symptoms than vice versa, and there are clear payoffs for men as a consequence.”
Married women, for instance, are more likely than married men to make sure that their spouses go to routine medical appointments and take prescribed medications, she says.
Awesome, so we bet you’re wondering what kind of statistics are behind this. Well, in a study of 4,403 patients in Ontario who went to the hospital for chest pains, three quarters of them were married and arrived within 6 hours of symptoms. Not only that, but they got there a half hour sooner than the others, on average.
If you’re thinking there are other factors to include, well, sure there are. But the researchers found that the only other one that might have mattered as much would be the calling of an ambulance.
The weird thing is that when the study was happening, they weren’t looking specifically at men — but found the gap between wed and unwed only applied to them!
So strange! But if you take the reasons above the statistics as true, then, it does start making some sense!
We’re pretty interested in what would happen to the statistic in same-sex marriages. Someone get on that study! Ha!
[Image via AP Images.]