You Make My Blood Boil: Marriage Satisfaction and Blood Pressure

By Anastacia Mott Austin

How much does it annoy you if your spouse leaves the toilet seat up? If it bothers you a lot, you might want to keep a careful eye on your blood pressure.

A new study released this week reveals what common sense has probably already told you: happy couples are healthier people.

Being happily married accounted for lower blood pressure levels among both men and women than being single, said the report, even if singles had an active network of social support.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D, and colleagues at Brigham Young University published their study in this week’s issue of The Annals of Behavioral Medicine. The team evaluated 204 married people and 99 singles, aged 21-68. They also had the patients fill out extensive surveys about the quality of their social relationships. The results were categorized into three groups of subjects: happily married, single, and unhappily married.

The study offers new insight because previous reports had only considered marital status, not satisfaction within a marriage. This study showed clearly that marital happiness was the determining factor in blood pressure changes. Those who were happily married had the lowest 24-hour monitored blood pressure of the three groups.

"It’s not just being married that benefits health. What's really the most protective of health is having a happy marriage," said Holt-Lunstad to reporters.

However, the reverse was also true, as folks with unhappy marriages had blood pressure levels that were higher than singles and the happy people. "Marriage must be of a high quality to be advantageous," wrote the study’s authors. "In other words, one is better off single than unhappily married."

Well, duh. This should come as no surprise to most married people. The study didn’t note the results if one’s annoying husband forgot to put the toilet seat down one day, but made up for it by picking up his stinky socks the next. One would guess there might be more fluctuations in the blood pressure of those happily-married folks if they had been monitored for more than one 24-hour period.

The study’s authors were surprised by the fact that even singles with healthy, rewarding social networks still scored higher blood pressure readings than the happy marrieds. "There seem to be some unique health benefits from marriage," said Holt-Lunstad.

Of particular importance was the fact that night-time dips of blood pressure were greater in the happily married couples than in singles or the unhappily wed. "Research has shown that people whose blood pressure remains high throughout the night are at much greater risk of cardiovascular problems than people whose blood pressure dips," said Holt-Lunstad. No results were given for otherwise-happily married people whose spouses snored like trains during that all-important nighttime period.

In fact several factors worth studying come to mind. In addition to the data on snoring spouses, what about blood pressure readings for parents of teens? What mitigating effect on those happy married people’s blood pressure would the chronically annoying neighbor be? What about grocery shopping with young children? What would the effects on blood pressure be of someone whose spouse never remembers to empty the dishwasher and scratches himself in public?

All things considered, the next study worth doing is the one where blood pressure is measured when one’s in-laws come to stay for the weekend, bringing their incontinent 15-year-old poodle and three-pack-a-day habit. Should be some interesting results from that one.