# Marriage life expectancy

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 14, 2004, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003 "2004-07-14T02:09:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Kel\_Varnsen\_Latex\_Division](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/aeb1de/32.png) [@Kel\_Varnsen\_Latex\_Division](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kel_Varnsen_Latex_Division)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2004, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003/1 "2004-07-14T02:09:19Z")

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Do both men and women who are married have a higher life expectancy? Or do just married men have a higher life expectncy than single men? Do married women have a lower life expectancy than single women?

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**Author:** ![stockton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5a626/32.png) [@stockton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stockton)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2004, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003/2 "2004-07-14T02:29:58Z")

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Old joke: It just SEEMS longer.

Happily married, myself.

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**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2004, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003/3 "2004-07-14T03:02:16Z")

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I do know that married men die before their wives, generally. But it’s because we \*want \* to.

I suppose if anyone found a life expectancy chart all would become clear. I’ve heard it said that single/widowed women live longer than anyone–no manstress to wear 'em down I guess.

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**Author:** ![Kel\_Varnsen\_Latex\_Division](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/aeb1de/32.png) [@Kel\_Varnsen\_Latex\_Division](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kel_Varnsen_Latex_Division)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2004, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/marriage-life-expectancy/255003/4 "2004-07-14T15:13:05Z")

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Here is the best I could find:

> [@](#):
>
> On 7 November 2002, the Mainichi Shimbun reported the conclusions of an Ehime University study on elderly couples which basically found that marriage is good for male life expectancy but detrimental to female life-spans.\* While it is almost universally accepted that marriage is good for men, the conclusion that marriage has a negative impact on female life expectancy goes against current thought in most family studies related research fields. With a sample of 3,136 people, the Ehime study found that unmarried men were 1.79 times more likely to die than their married counterparts, while women who were married had a 55% greater chance of dying than those who were alone. These results contradict most long-term research conducted by a wide range of family studies specialists. The Ehime findings may be atypical and probably tell us more about local marriage conditions in a small village deep in rural Japan than they do about the general correlation between marriage and life expectancy in Japan.

Not sure how this would relate to general population.

[http://www.glocom.org/debates/20021113\_curtin\_marriage/](http://www.glocom.org/debates/20021113_curtin_marriage/)