What is it about?
With longitudinal data from 305 community-dwelling older couples, we were able to identify four styles of marital closeness and their impact on mortality risk, adjusting for other risk factors including age, gender, race, financial strain, chronic health conditions, functional disability, cognitive impairment, depressive symptoms, self-rated health. and behavioral measures including smoking, drinking, and weight, that might have confounded the results.
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Why is it important?
Data from both spouses were available, allowing this to be the first study to examine style differences within marriages of older community-dwelling couples and their impact on longevity. A protective marital style emerged for all men and even more strongly for those women had ever raised a child. Many potentially confounding variables were available, permitting sophisticated analyses of the data.
Perspectives
This study demonstrated that marriage alone is not protective of longevity, the effects depend on qualities within the marriage, including closeness or intimacy. Also interesting, women who had raised a child were protected by leaning on their husbands for emotional support or self-disclosure while those women who had not raised a child were less likely to die in the 6 years of the study if they had a husband leaning on them. Note that the results are cohort dependent and the respondents were over 65 when the study of non-institutionalized adults began in 1982, so they were born in 1917 or earlier.
Roni Beth Tower
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Types of Marital Closeness and Mortality Risk in Older Couples, Psychosomatic Medicine, July 2002, Wolters Kluwer Health,
DOI: 10.1097/00006842-200207000-00015.
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