206 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
who stay single. DePaulo concludes, “It’s better to have no rela-
tionship than to be in a bad relationship.” DePaulo also tries to
further re-analyze a few other claims of the pro-marriage propo-
nents. For example, it’s indeed true that currently married people
report a better sex life than single people... but men who are
divorced and living with a new girlfriend report even better sex.
So, does being married really make you happier? Here’s one good
reason to get married... you may live longer. According to a
recent study conducted by two UCLA professors, individu-
als who never marry have the highest risk of early death! Their
data seems to support the hypothesis that the greater level of
social isolation associated with having never married tends to
trigger other negative health consequences. Their statistics also
seem to indicate that those whose spouses had died were almost
40 percent more likely to die sooner than married people still
living with their spouses. Those supposedly apocryphal stories
about spouses who die within days of each other may have a fair
amount of truth to them. After all, there is certainly something
favorable to be said about the institution of marriage, which is
specifically structured to keep a permanent companion and care-
taker constantly nearby.
Perennial bachelor types fared even worse than did those who
had been married, but later divorced. Folks who had married
and then divorced were 27 percent more likely to have shorter
lives, but those who had never been married were 58 percent more
likely to die a premature death. The “never-married penalty” was
greater for men than women.
Marriage isn’t all good news, however, even on the health
front. For one thing, it may apparently make you fatter! Accord-
ing to a study done by the School of Public Health at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina, marriage does tend to cause weight gain.
This is especially true for newly married men and women in their
early twenties who gain six to nine pounds more than their single
peers. Overall, married people are more prone to be overweight
or obese. Married men in particular are nearly 20 percent more
likely than unmarried men to be overweight.
Married couples build up more wealth. So we now know how being
married may affect your weight and your life span, but what about