A Gentle Reminder That Being Single Will Kill You
Teams of scientists around the world are all hard at work on a single subject. While we wish they were singularly focused on curing fatal diseases or giving the world the hovercraft that we so desperately need, they just can’t stop studying whether it’s healthier to be single or married.
The latest finding actually comes from an analysis of 90 previous studies that included 500 million people. Researchers from the University of Louisville compared the risk of mortality for single people and those who are married, excluding those who are widowed and divorced, MSNBC reports. Unsurprisingly, they found that marriage is beneficial. Single men have a 32% higher risk of death across their lifetime, and single women have a 23% higher risk. That means that “under the worst-case scenario” single men could die 17 years earlier than married men, and single women could die 15 years earlier.