Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [88]
Scientists have discovered all sorts of benefits due to regular sex—better blood flow and circulation, boosting the immune system, warding off colds and infections, making us less susceptible to depression. A survey of 16,000 Americans found that those who had the most sex were also the happiest. What does this have to do with getting married? Married people have a huge built-in advantage when it comes to regular sex for the simple reason that they have a lifelong sexual partner. That’s not to say that they don’t face their own challenges, such as maintaining passion for one another over the years, but they do have more sex—on average 30 percent more—and better sex, according to the studies.
There are other benefits as well. Even leaving sex aside, marriage improves your health. As we saw in chapter 3½, single people have significantly higher rates of mortality (50 percent higher for women, and a whopping 250 percent higher for men), and not being married reduces the average man’s life more than heart disease. Not being married shortens a woman’s life more than cancer or living in poverty. There are a host of reasons for this. Men are likely to cut back on a range of unhealthy activities, such as drinking, when they get married. Marriage also brings significant economic advantages. Married men and women enjoy higher average household incomes. In 1997, married couples averaged $47,129 compared to $26,203 for single men and $15,892 for single women.
Perhaps most important, there are the subtle and less quantifiable benefits. What sort of value do you place on companionship? It is difficult to put a number on that, but studies have shown that loneliness causes stress and weakens the immune system. We are social beings, and marriage is the great bulwark against finding ourselves alone. Luckily, most seem to realize this. When people are asked to name their top goals, a happy marriage always heads the list. For those who want more evidence on the benefits of matrimony, I invite you to read Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite’s The Case For Marriage, which systematically lays out all of these advantages and numerous others that accrue to happily married couples. But these numbers come with a big caveat—an unhappy marriage can turn these rosy statistics in the other direction. According to one study, an unhappy marriage increases your chances of getting sick by 35 percent and shortens your life by an average of four years. And economists have estimated that getting divorced is the equivalent of losing $66,000 annually.
MARRIAGE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Of course, if a happy marriage was easy to achieve, we’d have a much lower divorce rate and far fewer affairs. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to fall in love than it is to stay in love. Just as we can use the body’s own chemistry to chart the effect of infatuation, we can also use it to understand that waning desire is a natural part of any long-term relationship. As Oscar Wilde said, “The essence of romance is uncertainty,” but uncertainty is precisely what you are giving up when you get married. Sadly, finding the right person can never be reduced simply to smelling sweaty T-shirts, appealing though that prospect might be. As studies have shown, this chemical element of romance lessens over time. One researcher has found that the altered brain chemistry of falling in love lasts roughly six to eight months. Others have found that it takes two to three years for the feelings of infatuation to fade to feelings