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Research in this WellBeing Natural Health & Living News item was sourced from: Social Science and Medicine

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Divorce hurts health

17 February 2012

As a society we can be pretty disparaging about marriage. People say that you don’t know what happiness is until you get married…but by then it’s too late. They also say that marriage is the process of finding out what kind of person your partner would have preferred. Yes, derogatory comments about marriage abound but deep at the heart of this jovial attitude of disrespect lies a fundamental acknowledgement that a good marriage is a wonderful gift. The evidence of this lies not only in the fruits of healthy marriages but in the shrapnel of divorce. Now a new study has shown that the age at which you experience divorce dictates how devastatingly unhealthy it can be.

To establish this, researchers analysed health data on more than 1200 people over a fifteen year period. They measured the difference in health status between couples who remained married during the fifteen years of the study and those couples who divorced during the study.

The results showed that the difference between married and divorced people was greater the younger the people were. So for instance, people who were divorced between the ages of 35 and 41 reported greater health problems than those who were divorced between ages 44 and 50.

Interestingly, the impact of divorce was also far greater on baby-boomers than it was on older generations.

There are lots of possible reasons for these findings. It might be that the pressure to stay married was greater for older generations and so more may have remained in unhappy marriages so that when divorce came, it was a relief.

Overall, the results showed that people going through a divorce during the study were much less healthy than married people. However, people who were already divorced at the start of the study had similar health status to married people.

All of that means that divorce is tough, not just psychologically but physically as well. You need to support yourself physically while it is happening or you’ll have a health issue to deal with as well.