TIME Magazine: The Science of Romance - 1/20/08

[Smartmarriages]

- THE SCIENCE OF ROMANCE: TIME MAGAZINE'S JAN 28 ISSUE

Get this issue of TIME this week, while it's available. Buy several - for
your files, your waiting room, and to give to officials to explain why
marriage education is so necessary. It makes the case: we not only need to
help couples have the confidence to marry but to have the knowledge and
skills to have healthy marriages.   See the table of contents at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/current, and read and memorize the article
on marriage below. 

In same in-box that brought me Peggy's email and TIME magazine article, got
this nice notice about a marriage seminar in east Texas. Just what the
doctor ordered.  - diane

> 1/19/08-Tyler
> Healthy Marriage Seminar Held In Tyler
> KLTV.
> 
> Helping East Texans maintain healthy marriages was the goal at a seminar in
> Tyler, Saturday. East Texas ministers and members of VOW came together to
> reach out to Hispanic couples. Through the marriage enrichment series, couples
> are counseled and taught the importance of communication in their
> relationships, all to help build stronger marriages.
> 
> "Today, we're seeing a decrease in the number of marriages and an increase in
> the number divorces," said VOW Program Director Justin Waite.  "We want to
> help them establish the understanding that there are benefits from a physical
> manner.  That most of the time, married couples make more money and most of
> the time they live longer."  Organizers say more ministers are needed to be
> counselors and help break the language barrier with the Hispanic community.

 - diane 
######################
> Dear Diane,
> The January 28, 2008 issue of Time Magazine has a 47-page section on "The
> Science of Romance" - which is also the Cover. One of the articles is
> titled "Marry Me" and focuses on the health benefits of marriage, making
> many of the points being made by SmartMarriages. It quotes a number of
> scientific experts, including John Gottman.
> Peggy Vaughan 

Marry Me
Say yes, and you're in for more than love, children ad a home.
Better health and a longer life are part of the deal.

By Lori Oliwenstein
Time Magazine, issue January 28, 2008

Miriam Kamin is feeling a lot better now, thank you very much.
It was rough there for a while--infertility, a crippling case of
endometriosis, the collapse of her nine-year marriage, and four years of
single parenting while building a career as a corporate blogger. Then, last
May, she married Mark, a longtime friend. And that, she says, has made all
the difference.

"I've struggled with depression for most of my life," she explains. "Yet,
despite the fact that I've moved, relocated my kids and am working harder
than I have in a very long time, I'm not on medication right now. I had no
idea marriage was supposed to be this much fun."

Never mind the popular palaver about a good marriage as a source of bliss
for the couple, security for the kids and stability for society. Plenty of
spouses--at least after the first wedded year--just come to see it as a
whole lot of work. And why shouldn't they? Pair up any two people with
often clashing needs, add the pressure-cooker variables of kids, doctor
bills, career, housework, car repairs and the fact that someone--he knows
who he is--can't pull himself away from the TV during college-basketball
season, and there are bound to be problems. Marriage is criticized as a
source of stress (and it is), conflict (that too) and endless crises that
need to be resolved (guilty there as well).

But it's also something more. Decades of data collection have shown that
marriage--for all its challenges--is like a health-insurance policy. A 2006
paper that tracked mortality over an eight-year period found that people
who never married were 58% likelier to die during that time than married
folks were. And no wonder. Marriage means no more drinking at singles' bars
until closing, no more eating uncooked ramen noodles out of the bag and
calling it a meal. According to a 2004 report from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), married people are less likely to smoke or
drink heavily than people who are single, divorced or widowed. These sorts
of lifestyle changes are known to lower rates of cardiovascular disease,
cancer and respiratory diseases. And while you might sometimes gripe that
your spouse drives you nuts, just the opposite is true. Married people have
lower rates of all types of mental illnesses and suicide. And none of that
touches the reduced likelihood of contracting sexually transmitted diseases
that comes simply from climbing out of the dating pool.

"I clearly recall my then boyfriend and myself watching TV in the early
'80s and hearing about AIDS," says psychologist and sex therapist Stephanie
Buehler. "We looked at each other wide-eyed. I don't know that we chose to
marry because of this, but it was a factor that pushed us to stay together
and remain monogamous."

All the health benefits of marriage are consistent across age, race,
education and income groups, and while researchers have not conducted
equally exhaustive studies of gay couples, the benefits probably flow to
them too. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Smoking and drinking
naturally decline if you've got a spouse at your side flashing you a
don't-you-dare look when you reach for a cigarette or a third glass of
wine. Depression and other emotional ills are less likely to go undiagnosed
if there's someone at home who's mindful of your moods and notices if they
darken. But there are other, less self-evident things at work too--things
that you didn't realize when you decided to get married and that scientists
and doctors are only now beginning to appreciate fully.

Marriage on the Brain

For all the watch-your-cholesterol lifestyle safeguards spouses erect
around each other, much of what makes marriage so healthy for us takes
place within our own bodies, entirely without our knowledge. A lot of those
benefits come down to stress--or, specifically, the management of it.
Stress puts into motion a biological cascade involving hormones, glands and
neural circuits, all activating one another in a complex feedback loop.
When you are stuck in traffic or overwhelmed at work or worn down by the
kids, the hypothalamus--a structure buried deep in the midbrain--tells your
adrenal gland to pump out a supply of the stress hormone cortisol.
Cortisol, in turn, tells your body to stop worrying about its basic
metabolic needs and instead to "do the things you need to do to save
yourself from whatever created the stress," says University of Virginia
neuroscientist James Coan.

That's great if you're fleeing an attacking bear, since the things you need
to do to save yourself require boosting your heart rate and respiration,
tensing your muscles and generally cranking up your body's alert level. But
such an energy-intensive system is designed to be used only in brief
bursts; you either escape the bear or you get eaten by it, but either way
the crisis ends. The daily stresses of the modern world can throw our
bodies into emergency mode and keep us there. That takes a toll through
high blood pressure, tension headaches and a lot of gnawed pencils. "If
you're chronically releasing stress hormones, your body starts to fall
apart," says Coan. "Ultimately, you're going to live less long--and you're
going to be miserable."

Being married somehow helps the body circumvent this mess, either by
hushing the hypothalamus or reducing cortisol production. Coan and his
colleagues conducted an experiment in which married women underwent brain
scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the scans,
the women were told they were going to receive a painful electric shock.
The researchers then watched to see how the subjects' brains responded to
the threat and found that among happily married women, hypothalamus
activity declined sharply if husbands held their wives' hands during the
experiment. Women who reported being less satisfied with their
marriage--and women whose hands were held by strangers--got little such
relief. "The effect was pretty profound," says Coan. "It was much stronger
than we thought it would be."

He also found that spousal hand-holding had an effect in an entirely
different part of the brain: the right anterior insula, which responds to
the threat of pain by calling your attention to the part of your body
that's in danger, increasing the amount of discomfort you ultimately feel.
In Coan's study, the right anterior insula of happily married women stayed
relatively quiet. "This suggests," he says, "that your spouse may function
as an analgesic."

All of this is especially good news for men. A study published in the
January 2008 issue of the journal Health Psychology showed that while
married men get relief from their workday barrage of stress hormones when
they come home after a particularly busy day at work--perhaps benefiting
from the same marital proximity the women in the fMRI study
enjoyed--working women are able to de-stress similarly only if they
describe their marriage as a happy one.

There may be a simple explanation for this. "I'm speculating," says Rena
Repetti, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los
Angeles, and one of the authors of the study, "but it may just be that some
of these women are coming home and facing dinner prep and assisting the
kids with homework, and they're not getting the help that the more
maritally satisfied women are getting."

The full explanation for this gender gap, however, is undoubtedly more
complicated than that. Long-term data from an Israeli study, for example,
indicate that the life-lengthening powers of marriage have increased over
time--but again, mostly for men. Over nearly two decades, the study found,
married men widened the already significant difference in cancer-death
incidence between themselves and unmarried men by 25%; married women gained
absolutely zero ground over their unmarried peers. Why this subtle somatic
sexism? "This is a gross generalization, but women are really the mental-
and physical-health housekeepers for a marriage," says psychologist Janice
Kiecolt-Glaser of the Ohio State University College of Medicine. "They are
often the ones who prod men to go to a doctor or to eat more healthily."

Miriam Kamin's husband Mark agrees. "As a man, I'm more concerned with
making sure the oil has been changed in the last 3,000 miles than with
whether I had a physical lately," he says. "Miriam's much more likely to
notice something is wrong with me than I am."

When Things Turn Bad

For all its benefits, marriage is nota gift certificate for good health.
For one thing, it's fattening. According to a CDC study of health and
marriage, married people, while least likely to be physically inactive, are
most likely to be overweight or obese. Married men, in particular, seem to
pack on the pounds after they say their vows: they are nearly 20% more
likely to be overweight or obese than are men who have never
married--perhaps because they simply have someone to sit down to dinner
with each night or perhaps because the often empty refrigerator of a
onetime bachelor fills up fast when someone is making sure to do the
shopping.

Data also show that the stress of a bad marriage can undo much of the good
that comes with a happy one. In a series of studies, Kiecolt-Glaser and her
husband, immunologist Ronald Glaser, also of the Ohio State University
College of Medicine, found that "negative marital interactions," such as
arguments, name-calling and nonverbal cues like eye-rolling lead to
increases in cortisol and decreases in immune function and even
wound-healing. The effects were observed in both sexes, but particularly
strongly in women. The eye-rolling studies go even deeper than that, with
related research conducted by marital expert John Gottman of the Gottman
Institute in Seattle revealing just how sensitive spouses are to such
nonverbal signs of disdain or dismissal. Coan, who has collaborated with
Gottman, says: "How often someone rolls their eyes at you can predict how
often you need to go to the doctor."

And when the protective bonds of marriage break, watch out. Those
supposedly apocryphal tales of spouses who die within days of each other
have more than a little truth to them. A 2007 British study found that at
any given moment, a bereaved spouse has a greater risk of death from just
about any cause (except, oddly, lung cancer) than a still married person.
"Over time," says Coan, "your brain becomes used to the other person as
part of your emotional-regulation strategy. You take that person away, and
you become what we dryly call dysregulated--weepy, mournful, stay up half
the night. This can come from death, divorce, even a long business trip.
When those bonds break, it can cause a lot of pain and emotional suffering."

Certainly not all suddenly single spouses are fated to languish this
way--no more than all people who never pair off are destined for a
shortened life filled with illness and stress. Humans are socially
resourceful creatures who build and rebuild networks of relationships,
getting the attention, hand-holding and even scolding they need in a lot of
different ways. Still, it's hard to argue with an institution that keeps a
companion and caretaker constantly nearby, even if now and again--when a
wet towel has once again been dropped on the floor or a tube of toothpaste
has been squeezed all wrong--we may lose sight of that happy fact.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704686,00.html

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