Greedy Marriage | Loneliness and Heart Disease - 9/17/07

[Smartmarriages]

- THE GREEDY MARRIAGE
- LONELINESS CAUSES HEART DISEASE?

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- THE GREEDY MARRIAGE

The greedy marriage
Two scholars argue that good spouses can make bad neighbors
The Boston Globe 
By Chris Berdik  |  September 16, 2007

> "The purpose of marriage is to raise the next generation," says Kay Hymowitz,
> a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. "And to call that greedy is just an
> astounding use of the term." . . .

> . . . But Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute says Gerstel and Sarkisian
> ignored important measures of community involvement. She points out that the
> article doesn't discuss volunteering, which is more prevalent among the
> married than those who have never married (32 percent vs. 20 percent)
> according to a 2006 Bureau of Labor Statistics tabulation. Nor does it mention
> voting rates: Sixty-seven percent of married people vote compared with just 44
> percent of those who have never been married, according to the Census Bureau.
> 
> "What is this community the authors are talking about?" she asks.


THE WEDDING SEASON is wrapping up, and many of the newly joined were no
doubt advised that love is patient and kind. But now two Massachusetts
sociologists say love can also be greedy.

More precisely, marriage can be greedy, according to Naomi Gerstel of the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Natalia Sarkisian of Boston
College, who have written a paper called "Marriage: the Good, the Bad, and
the Greedy." Analyzing two nationwide social surveys, they found that
married couples spend less time than singles calling, writing, and visiting
with their friends, neighbors, and extended family. According to their
research, married people are also less likely to give friends and neighbors
emotional support and practical help, such as with household chores.

Gerstel and Sarkisian's research flies in the face of recent academic
studies and political speeches arguing that marriage is the endangered
cornerstone of a healthy society, benefiting the mental, physical, and
financial well-being of children and adults, and, ultimately, their fellow
citizens. They argue that marriage may actually, albeit unwittingly, have
just the opposite effect - sapping the strength of American communities and
diminishing our ability to think and act for the common good.

"Many, bemoaning the retreat from marriage, also mourn the loss of
community," they wrote in the Fall 2006 issue of Contexts, a journal of the
American Sociological Association. "What these nostalgic discussions do not
recognize, ironically, is that marriage and community are often at odds with
one another."

While some sociologists have applauded Gerstel and Sarkisian's questioning
of conventional wisdom, critics dismiss the "greedy marriage" research,
countering the findings with statistics that indicate a greater social
involvement among married people. Others say Sarkisian and Gerstel ignore
what really supports communities in the long term - the health and welfare
of children.

"The purpose of marriage is to raise the next generation," says Kay
Hymowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. "And to call that greedy is
just an astounding use of the term."

Gerstel and Sarkisian say that they have nothing against marriage. They
argue that the nature of the institution in America has changed - in ways
that can endanger both society and the marriages themselves. And on this
point, it turns out, even their critics agree.

Over the last century, Americans have become more romantic about marriage,
and that's not always a good thing, according to some scholars.

Through the mid-20th century, husbands and wives were expected to fulfill
the culturally defined roles as breadwinners and homemakers, what
sociologists call the "institutional marriage." But today, as a recent
Gallup poll finds, 94 percent of young, unmarried women and men say their
primary goal in marriage is finding a soul mate.

One marker of the rise of soul-mate marriage is honeymoons, according to
Stephanie Coontz, a sociologist with the Council on Contemporary Families, a
nonprofit family research and advocacy group based in Chicago. The now
nearly ubiquitous private adventures for newlyweds were nearly unheard of
until the late 19th century. And even then, Coontz notes, the happy couples
often took along relatives and friends for company.

"Over the past 100 years, we've made marriage much more precious," she says.
"And the same things that have made it more passionate and beneficial for
its members have also made it more isolating."

This notion is supported by a 2006 study by sociologists from Duke and the
University of Arizona, which found that the number of people with whom
Americans said they discussed important matters from 1985 to 2004 dropped by
one-third. The only relationship that saw an increase in such discussions
was marriage.

To conduct their own investigation, Gerstel and Sarkisian analyzed answers
from the 1992-94 National Survey of Families and Households and 2004 General
Social Survey, large surveys that asked thousands of Americans questions
about things like closeness with extended family, attitudes about raising
kids, and family routines.

They found that married respondents were significantly less likely than the
unmarried to contact or see their parents and siblings, or to give them
emotional or "practical" support, such as help with chores or babysitting.
The married also less frequently spent time with or helped friends and
neighbors. For instance, more than 80 percent of never-married individuals
said they'd called or written to their parents in the last month, compared
with just 60 percent of married people. Likewise, around 70 percent of
unmarried people but only 30 percent of the married had socialized with
friends in the last month.

There were two interesting exceptions. First, when it came to helping
friends, the marriage gap showed up only with white couples, not among
African-Americans or Hispanics. The researchers don't offer any explanation
for this. But they do have ideas about what's behind a second wrinkle in
their findings: When married couples had children it erased the gap in the
amount of emotional and practical support they gave to friends and
neighbors. Married couples with children gave just as much support as single
parents or childless singles. The researchers surmise that while raising
kids eats up lots of time and emotional energy, married parents rebuild
their social networks while finding playmates, caretakers, and activity
partners for their children.

"It really is marriage, not children, that's responsible for cutting off
ties to people in the community," Gerstel says.

But Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute says Gerstel and Sarkisian ignored
important measures of community involvement. She points out that the article
doesn't discuss volunteering, which is more prevalent among the married than
those who have never married (32 percent vs. 20 percent) according to a 2006
Bureau of Labor Statistics tabulation. Nor does it mention voting rates:
Sixty-seven percent of married people vote compared with just 44 percent of
those who have never been married, according to the Census Bureau.

"What is this community the authors are talking about?" she asks.

It is a somewhat muddled portrait. Gerstel and Sarkisian note that married
men are more likely than their single counterparts to sign petitions, but
also that single women are more likely than married women to attend
political meetings, sign petitions, and raise money for political causes.
They also find that marriage increases men's participation in religious life
- but not women's.

Gerstel and Sarkisian stress that their main objective was not to attack
marriage, but to argue for a broader conception of what marriage is and
should be.

"Finding a soul mate means turning inward - pushing aside other
relationships," they write. They put forth several alternative models for
marriage as less insular and more supportive of community, including
pre-industrial societies in which "weddings are clearly community events
[that] celebrate newly formed kin alliances." Sarkisian is also studying
data from China to see if similar isolation occurs with married couples in
that country.

But it's not just community that is hurt by the ideal of a self-sufficient
soul-mate marriage, she and Gerstel contend.

"If you see marriage as the only place where you can get support and
companionship, it can make marriage itself more fragile," says Sarkisian.
"If you have your expectations too high, it's kind of setting yourself up
for failure."

And here, it turns out, Gerstel and Sarkisian's harshest critics agree with
them, up to a point.

But rather than arguing for a model of marriage in which husbands and wives
cultivate ties beyond their spouse and children, some marriage promoters
extol the virtues of the more traditional marriage, which emphasizes a
person's responsibility as a husband, wife, or parent.

The lack of commitment to these roles, says Hymowitz, is "the reason for so
many divorces and out-of-wedlock childbirths."

It is also important to realize that marriage can be difficult, adds
Elizabeth Marquardt, a scholar at the Institute for American Values in New
York.

"If you're in a bad period," Marquardt says, "it doesn't mean you're going
from bad to worse and you need to get out as fast as you can."

Gerstel and Sarkisian's research suggests another lesson: try calling a
friend.

"My sense is that there are people out there who have read our article, and
it resonates with their feelings about their life," Sarkisian says. "They
feel like something's missing."

Chris Berdik is the senior writer for Bostonia, the alumni magazine of
Boston University

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- LONELINESS CAUSES HEART DISEASE?

> ³We found that what counts at the level of gene expression is not how many
> people you know, it¹s how many you feel really close to over time.²

From: NewsMax Health Newsletter <newsmax at reply.newsmax.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007

 Loneliness Causes Inflammation, Leads to Heart  Disease  It¹s already known
that a person¹s social environment can affect their health, with those who
are socially isolated ‹ that is, lonely, suffering from higher mortality
than people who are not. Now, in the first study of its kind, published in
the current issue of the journal Genome Biology, UCLA researchers have
identified a distinct pattern of gene expression in immune cells from people
who experience chronically high levels of loneliness. The findings suggest
that feelings of social isolation are linked to alterations in the activity
of genes that drive inflammation, the first response of the immune system.
The study provides a molecular framework for understanding why social
factors are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections
and cancer.  Having previously established that lonely people suffer from
higher mortality than people who are not, researchers are now trying to
determine whether that risk is a result of reduced social resources, such as
physical or economic assistance, or from the biological impact of social
isolation on the function of the human body. ³What this study shows is that
the biological impact of social isolation reaches down into some of our most
basic internal processes the activity of our genes.² said Steve Cole, an
associate professor of medicine in the division of Hematology-Oncology at
the David Geffen School of Medicine, and a member of the UCLA Cousins
Center for Psychoneuroimmunology.  ³We found that changes in immune cell
gene expression were specifically linked to the subjective experience of
social distance,² said Cole, who is also a member of the Jonsson
Comprehensive Cancer Center. ³The differences we observed were independent
of other known risk factors, such as health status, age, weight, and
medication use. The changes were even independent of the objective size of a
person¹s social network.²  Cole and colleagues at UCLA and the University of
Chicago used DNA microarrays to survey the activity of all known human genes
in  white blood cells from 14 individuals in the Chicago Health, Aging, and
Social Relations Study. Six participants scored in the top 15 percent of the
UCLA Loneliness Scale, a widely used measure of loneliness that was
developed in the 1970s; the others scored in the bottom 15 percent. The
researchers found 209 gene transcripts (the first step in the making of a
protein) were differentially expressed between the two groups, with 78 being
overexpressed and 131 underexpressed. ³Leukocyte (white blood cell) gene
expression appears to be remodelled in chronically lonely individuals,² said
Cole.  Genes overexpressed in lonely individuals included many involved  in
immune system activation and inflammation. But interestingly, several other
key gene sets were underexpressed, including those involved in antiviral
responses and antibody production. ³These findings provide molecular targets
for our efforts to block the adverse health effects of social isolation,²
said Cole.  ³We found that what counts at the level of gene expression is
not how many people you know, it¹s how many you feel really close to over
time.² In the future, he said, the transcriptional fingerprint  they¹ve
identified might become useful as a Œbiomarker¹ to monitor  interventions
designed to reduce the impact of loneliness on health.  This study was
supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Mind, Body, Brain and
Health Initiative of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the
Norman Cousins Center at UCLA,  the John Templeton Foundation, and the James
B Pendelton Charitable Trust. Other authors included Louise C Hawkley,
Jesusa M Arevalo, Caroline Y Sung, Robert M Rose, and John T Cacioppo.  The
Cousins Center encompasses an interdisciplinary network of  scientists
working to advance the understanding of psychoneuroimmunology by linking
basic and clinical research programs and by translating findings into
clinical practice. The center is affiliated with the Semel Institute for
Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the David Geffen School of Medicine.
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